I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore Review: Everyone Is an Asshole Chloé Cooper Jones
February 23, 2017

You might recognize Macon Blair from Green Room and Blue Ruin. You might also recognize him from behind the camera in his excellent new movie out tomorrow on Netflix.

When Ruth Kimke, the protagonist of Netflix’s I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, says “everyone is an asshole,” she’s talking about you too. She doesn’t think we’re all bad people, just that sometimes we’re “dildos and fuckfaces.” After watching her endure, in the opening scenes, an endless series of small slights at the hands of oblivious shoppers who cut her in line at the grocery store or drivers who carelessly reverse into her path, it’s hard to disagree with her. These slights take a more serious turn when Ruth, played with great restraint by Melanie Lynskey, returns from work one day to find her house burglarized. She’s unharmed and nothing much has been stolen, but Ruth is shaken by the violation and looking for someone to care.

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The cops who respond to the scene do little other than lecture Ruth about her lack of home security; her neighbors remain unfazed at the news of her break-in and offer no assistance. Ruth flees to her best friend Angie’s house, but Angie, busy with a family and a life of her own, can only give out platitudes and a joint by way of comfort. None of these dismissals are malicious in intent; rather Macon Blair, who wrote the screenplay and makes his directorial debut with I Don’t Feel at Home, presents these thoughtless moments as the byproducts of the fact that being human means we’re often too entrenched in our own realities and our own needs. It’s why we’re assholes to others.

Unable to shake the frustration she feels, Ruth decides to investigate the burglary herself which leads her to question Tony (Elijah Wood), a man who lives down the block, as to whether he’s noticed anyone suspicious lurking in the neighborhood. Tony has patchy facial hair and a long rattail; wears sleeveless t-shirts and fingerless gloves; and earnestly loves kung fu, fantasy novels, and his dog Kevin. He’s so enraged by the news of the burglary that he slams his nunchucks into a table and shouts to the sky in anger. Tony’s simple willingness to take Ruth seriously, to see her trauma as she sees it and care, emboldens Ruth who has, until this point, felt isolated in a world that seems to deny her reality and her reasonable requests for consideration. This is a feeling that, for viewers who also read the news, will feel far too relatable. The antidote is empathy, and the sheer force of the empathy Tony possesses for Ruth and his quickness to anger over her experience of injustice bonds them and sends them together down an increasingly violent and absurd path to discover who has robbed Ruth and why.

Blair is better known as an actor, specifically for his roles in the high-concept genre films Blue Ruin and Green Room, both written and directed by childhood pal Jeremy Saulnier. In Blue Ruin, Blair stars as Dwight, a man who seeks revenge but is untrained and ill-equipped to carry it out. One can see the influence of that role in I Don’t Feel at Home, as Ruth and Tony, too, make for completely incompetent detectives whose best ideas include ninja throwing stars and fake police badges pillaged from boxes of children’s cereal. Blair takes admirable risks, putting Ruth and Tony into situations that, in the wrong hands, could easily feel precious—one antagonist asks if Ruth has ever eaten cat meat, insisting it turns him invisible—but Blair underplays these increasingly surreal moments, both in the way he directs the performances of the leads and in his visual style, so as not to dazzle, but disorient us, the effect of which amplifies the tension in climatic scenes with startling economy.

Because of their close collaboration and shared interest in making films that serve as variations on genres, viewers and reviewers might be tempted to think of Blair’s work as somehow extending from the work of Jeremy Saulnier, but I think in order to find a true progenitor for I Don’t Feel at Home (which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival) one has to go back to 1984’s Blood Simple. I’d imagine that those who saw the Coen Brother’s first feature when it was released felt much like I did watching Blair’s film—that what was unfolding on the screen was evidence of a highly singular and thrilling talent that is just getting started.
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