Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Macon Blair has quietly developed something of a following among genre fans thanks to his collaborations with Jeremy Saulnier in the color-coded murder sagas Blue Ruin and Green Room.
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore sees Blair stepping front and center, writing and directing a black comic caper about a depressed woman (Melanie Lynskey) whose mounting disgust with the world around her reaches a boiling point when her house is burgled.
Determined to get some answers and some measure of payback, she teams up with an eccentric neighbor (Elijah Wood), only to be caught off-guard when the investigation spirals into murderous confusion.
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was immediately snapped up by Netflix. But while Blair’s Film Twitter supporters (“Blai-niacs”?) were there, it seems that the film flew under many a radar.
No more! As part of our “For Your Consideration” series to highlight some of the most exciting, maybe-underseen offerings of 2017, we sat down with I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore to see if we feel comfortable with it in ours.
Next Week’s Pick:
Continuing with our selections For Your Consideration, Two Cents invites you to join us with The Big Sick, available via Amazon Prime, the (largely) true story about the courtship between Kumail Nanjiani (playing himself) and his wife Emily (Zoe Kazan), and the coma that came between them.
You can send your thoughts to [email protected] anytime before midnight on Thursday.
The Team
“That’s how hard I threw it,” Elijah Wood’s Tony says as he rips a throwing star out of the wall; and, with that moment relatively early on in the film, I’m 100% buckled up and along for the ride. Macon Blair’s directorial debut is fun, quirky, and extremely promising. Easily in my top 10–15 films of the year, I was excited to revisit this film for this week’s Two Cents.
I don’t know exactly how to capture how I feel about this film. It’s mostly just a ton of fun, with brilliant performances from Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood. It’s hard to categorize what genre or genres this film belongs in, as it combines many elements from a variety of films. There are hilarious moments and deep thoughts, as well as a great balance of fun and darkness.
In short, see this fucking movie now. (@ThePaintedMan)
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is an odd bird of a movie. Blair’s thriller bonafides have been more than proven due to his work on Blue Ruin and Green Room, and he clearly carried over the lessons for how to set-up and payoff explosive plot twists and also regular explosions. The final stretch of Anymore is a pretty breathtaking sequence of escalating mayhem, and Blair just keeps turning the screws and ramping things up to even crazier heights. Well played, all.
What doesn’t work as well for me (and maybe just me, based on Justin’s contribution and other stuff I’ve read on the film) is the humor, all of which is played so glaringly broad as to mostly just be distracting. The loopy, Coen-esque bursts of pointed silliness or exaggerated grotesque don’t really jive with the stark visuals and it leaves some actors (particularly a very game Elijah Wood) feeling like they’ve been teleported in from another, very different film. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore opens with its trampled heroine maneuvering through a day’s worth of human absurdity, rudeness, and stupidity in a montage, and right from the jump I’m on board with this relatable woman and her experience of living the film’s title. And when she describes the deep feeling of violation that enrages her when her house is broken into, anyone who’s had a similar experience immediately understands.
Macon Blair’s story of everyman — nay, everywoman — vigilantism strikes a chord and recalls his thrillers with Jeremy Saulnier, but injects humor and warmth that make this a tonally different animal than Blue Ruin or Green Room, though it still packs in their harrowing, swirling chaos.
Both Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood are incredible as the pair of awkward friends whose quest for natural justice gets them in too deep, and the film smartly puts you on their side while also making the argument that they’re probably wrong and this was a terrible mistake.
If I have any criticism it’s that things wrap up way too neatly at the end in a fashion that seems at odds with the aforementioned analysis of vigilantism, but with such lovable and downtrodden heroes, I’m OK with that. (@VforVashaw)
I’ll admit, I was oblivious the career of Melanie Lynskey. She went from “that girl in Heavenly Creatures” to indie star, and I missed the whole thing. That is until I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. While it was filmed in Portland, it very much has the feel of an Austin movie. That shouldn’t be too surprising when the man behind the helm is Macon Blair. Having watched this and Blue Ruin in close proximity, it’s no surprise they spring from the same well. When it comes to dark comedies, this isn’t the darkest or the funniest, but balances the two out to near perfection. Lynskey feels like a stand in for Blair, an introvert forced to take on a brutal and chaotic world. Elijah Wood had every chance to ruin this movie with his stardom, but he instead brings just the right amount of goober to the proceedings. This is a small movie but a movie with big ambitions, ones it universally fulfills. I maybe have missed this at least year’s SXSW, but now Netflix has made it where no one has to make that same mistake. (@rodmachen)
Watch it on Netflix:
https://www.netflix.com/title/80100937
Next week’s pick: