Fear not, ye sensitive viewers who have stumbled into writer-director Sam Levinson’s story of four young women who go from shamed, blamed, framed victims to avenging angels: You’ll get a brief roll-call montage of “trigger warning” alerts before the insanity kicks in. Part PSA and part sneering at the P.C. brigade, this introductory bit of ballyhoo proudly ticks off the potentially traumatizing elements you’re about to witness, including (but not limited to): bullying, classism, toxic masculinity, transphobia, guns, nationalism, racism, murder, the Male Gaze, rape (attempted), swearing, torture, violence, gore and fragile male egos. It’s a fine, and completely 100-percent accurate list, to which we’d also add: overuse of social media as a signifier of Western Civilization’s decline, way too many colored gels, nihilism chic, exploitation-spoiltation, flagrant abuse of split screens, Susan Sontag quotes and upspeak, a serious thirstiness for relevance and a penchant for mistaking snark for satire. These elements of Assassination Nation might be even more offensive than the ones the film ticks off in its pre-credits intro — this is not a safe space for folks allergic to self-regarding movies in which an aesthetic grab-bag is meant to double for a stylistic vision and all-caps screaming is supposed to translate as a voice. Levinson has given us an angry movie for angry times, which doesn’t necessarily make it a clever or coherent commentary on how American hypocrisy leads to American carnage. Or even, for that matter, a halfway decent slab of pumped-up pulp friction. “This is the story of how my town lost its motherfucking mind,” our narrator, the 18-year-old Lily (Odessa Young), tells us from the start; her everyburb U.S.A is named Salem, the first of many are-you-getting-it hammer blows to the head. Along with her three best friends — Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), Em (the mono-monikered Abra) and Bex (transgender actor Hari Nef) — this quartet spend their days drinking, smoking, sexting, sending out semi-nude pics to someone named “Daddy,” hooking up with bad boyfriends and worse backwards-baseball-capped bros … your usual teen shenanigans. Then, someone hacks the mayor’s computer, resulting in a press conference that ends with a bullet. (It’s naturally turned into viral-meme instantly.) Soon, the school principal (Colman Domingo) sees his texts, private emails, browser history, etc. go public as well. The hits keep on coming. Quicker than you can say, “Oh cool, I’ve seen Le Corbeau on FilmStruck too!”, everybody’s dirty secrets have hit the Internet and everyone is a suspect. Most folks, however, think Lily’s the culprit. All the more convenient to unleash a torrent of rancid misogyny, mob violence, boiling-over homophobia and hate crimes under the guise of paranoid national(ist) pride. Will there be direct quotes from Trump speeches? Are folks gonna slap on some Purge-lite creepy masks? Will all of the local dudes, from the chest-bumping jocks to the Nice Dad Who Lives Across the Street (Joel McHale), turn into a #YesAllMen militia of gun-toting rapists at the first sign of social breakdown? Are you too busy texting eyeroll emojis right now to even consider these questions? Assassination Nation‘s first half hits all the usual Heathers notes, with characters slinging slang and caustic, sarcastic asides (“My iPhoto looks like a snuff film”) in the name of selling a Hot Topic sense of subversion. It wouldn’t be the first movie to flirt with sex-and-violence sensationalism to get everyone hot and bothered while doling out mixed messages — sure, why not have your characters go on about being oversexualized as young women at the same time you’re actively objectifying them — but it may be the one most likely to think such things somehow count as a cake-and-ogle-it-too critique. Conversations about TMI in the Twitter age, how civilization can turn into savagery with just a single 2GB upload and why white male rage is less an epidemic than a biological plague are all wrapped up in bright neon packages and pseudo-profunditities, killing time between toxic 4chan-style outbursts. You’re reminded that righteous trolling is still trolling. Then comes the second half, at which point the film embraces its exploitation-cinema destiny and pivots into Faster, Pussycat! LOL! LOL! As intruders surround the house where Lily, Sarah, Em and Bex are watching a Japanese Female Scorpion entry (deep-cut meta film-nerd reference: add 5 points) and slowly infiltrate the place, we’re treated to a siege film with Slasher-flick P.O.V. shots and upside-down camera flips. This is where Levinson proves that he’s got chops — the shoot-outs and room-to-room stalking are choreographed with brutal precision and a nice sense of how to use space to sustain tension. It’s a momentary bright spot before some role reversals arm all four of the women, the bloodbath begins in earnest and you can’t tell whether the filmmaker is ripping off every female-revenge film he’s ever seen or just the second-hand ones that he read about in a Tarantino interview once. Yes, there is a P–sy-Grabs-Back catharsis in watching these four young women dish out payback to douchebags, especially in a week full of Kavanaugh-enabling news; you no longer have to wonder whether we’ll ever see a transgender action hero, because Nef gives you one in all her blood-splattered, vengeful glory. (Representation matters.) Yet so much of this feature-length screed rings false, especially when it attempts to serve up a rallying cry at the end that it hasn’t really earned. Stuck in a default mode of inchoate rage, it just ends up spewing for its own sake, a patchwork of provocation tries to pass itself as a sexed-up but serious state-of-our-nation’s-degeneration commentary. “I did it for the LOLs,” the eventual culprit admits when asked about the devastating data dump. Assassination Nation thinks its a fuck-you punchline. It’s actually the film’s most honest admission — its one true self-own.<doc-sep>Assassination Nation type Movie Smash-cut trigger warnings, a shotgun blast, the glassy ping of an iPhone: Assassination Nation telegraphs its M.O. before the opening credits roll. Sam Levinson’s pitch-black comedy is a bloody, wildly stylized study in 21st-century satire: Heathers without the hairbows, Natural Born Killers in suburban-Millennial drag. (Spring Breakers and I Spit on Your Grave also come to mind.) In a town called — not portentously at all — Salem, 18-year-old Lily (Odessa Young) cruises the hallways of her high school with best friends Bex (Hari Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), and Em (Abra). They’re the obvious cool girls of a thousand teen movies, but Levinson doesn’t let you forget for a minute that he knows it: “I love this song!” Bex exclaims as they roll through the quad. Which song? “This one,” she snaps her fingers, and the music cues up — conjuring the meta magic of filmmaking from thin air. Assassination NationAbra, Odessa Young, Hari Nef and Suki Waterhouse Credit: Neon Bex, by the way, is also trans; Em is black. It’s to the director’s and the actresses’ credit that none of this feels like ticked boxes on a diversity wish list. Anyway it’s blond, pretty, cis-gendered Lily who becomes the main target when a data leak exposes the town’s cross-dressing mayor, the earnest school principal, and dozens of other private citizens to ridicule, professional disgrace, and worse. Nation’s take on the corrosive reach of social media — with all the sex-shaming, tribalism, and amplified rage it only seems to viralize — is not exactly fresh. And for some, the movie’s blithe candy-apple feminism and cartoonish violence will no doubt come off as misguided as the targets they supposedly condemn. But there’s a kinetic energy in Levinson’s telling, and real catharsis in a riotous final sequence that feels all the more triumphant for the unlikeliness of such a bloody, happy ending. B+<doc-sep>My name is Sam Levinson, and I am the writer and director of “Assassination Nation.” So this is a scene later in the film in which the four girls are accused of being behind the massive data hack that resulted in all of the residents of Salem’s private information being leaked. They’re getting death threats online. They’re posting their address. And Em, who’s played by Abra here, is worried that her mother forgot to set the alarm. Initially, it was written as a house fire, actually, in the script. And because we’re a low budget film, we — we couldn’t afford a house fire. So Marcell Rev, the cinematographer and myself sat in a room with a kind of a 3D model of this house that we had found that was in Louisiana that kind of was on a corner, so we could basically — it had, you know, three sides that we — we could all see. The goal was to create a scene that felt as cinematic as — as a house fire but with — but something that we can shoot in — in 10 hours. So we sat there with, basically, this 3D model that Michael Grasley, our production designer, had built, and tried to figure out, what’s the scariest way possible that we could sort of, you know, choreograph this home invasion sequence? And we came up with this idea of shooting it from the outside. And actually, on — on this take here when the stunt guy grabs Abra and pulls her towards the window, he actually slams his hand into the glass, and the glass actually shattered for real, which was a moment where your kind of heart drops as a filmmaker, and you hope everyone’s O.K. But that ended up having to be our last take for that section right there, because we couldn’t replace the window. So we had kind of designed this dolly track that a techno crane with a 42-foot arm could sit on so it can actually go around all three sides of the house without a single cut. And so from that point on, it was just a matter of — of getting the choreography and the timing right. So, you know, I would sit with Marcell behind the crane and — and sort of walk with him with a radio that I could communicate with all the actors inside to make sure that they — they hit their marks or to make sure that they were — you know, the camera was keeping up with them, or they were keeping up with the camera, so it felt like this was something that was in motion and was continuing to sort of, you know, build suspense. There was also something that felt, you know, very apropos about watching this horror unfold and — and being helpless to it, which is, I think, something that we often feel and trolling through Twitter or — or Instagram and — and looking at these sort of tragedies unfold, where we’ve become sort of spectators to it. [ominous music] [gasps]<doc-sep>
The one good thing to say about the slasher pop satire “Assassination Nation,” a badly bungled attempt at social commentary from writer/director Sam Levinson, is that it’s certainly got spirit. This energetic, blood-slicked horror flick substitutes internet hackers for knife-wielding maniacs, and leaked nudes for slayings. It’s a chaotic jumble of movie references, cellphone footage, emojis, trigger warnings and edgy teen content. But it’s the fumbled “feminist” commentary that is just embarrassing to watch. The filmmakers have the gall to spend nearly two hours assaulting the audience with sexualized violence, only to turn around and offer up a patronizing lecture on the contradictory social conditioning of women as some kind of grrrl power rallying cry, like it’s a novel revelation. Dude really tried to mansplain the virgin/whore paradigm in the midst of this exploitative claptrap. “Assassination Nation,” a mystery about a hacker targeting a suburban town, is a tortured, yet dumb metaphor for the Salem Witch Trials — we know this because the town where this takes place is named Salem. The idea seems to be that we’re still attacking innocent people based on rumor and hearsay. People are pilloried for the pics and texts found on their phone — from the mayor’s naughty cross-dressing, to the principal’s personal photos. Attention quickly focuses on a quartet of smart, sexy, woke BFFs Lily (Odessa Young), Bex (Hari Nef), Em (Abra), and Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), because, well, they’re smart, sexy, rebellious young women hellbent on furthering their female pleasure agenda. Our heroine, Lily, makes impassioned arguments about the liberating and intellectual nature of nudity while simultaneously sexting nudes to the dad (Joel McHale) of a kid she used to babysit. Her friends hector her boyfriend Mark (Bill Skarskard) about orally pleasuring her. Dude really tried to mansplain the virgin/whore paradigm in the midst of this exploitative claptrap. They would ostensibly be the modern equivalent of witches, and Lily is first targeted by the angry mob that took down the mayor, the principal and the head cheerleader (Bella Thorne) when everyone identifies her in the sexy pics she sent to “Daddy.” Ostracized, she becomes a target for physical assault. “Why do people see a picture of a naked girl and want to kill her?” Good question, Lily, it’s one we’ve been asking for eons. She’s also falsely identified as the hacker, the cause of all this pain and discord. Every now and then, there’s a flash of a great idea in “Assassination Nation,” whether it’s the revolutionary way the girls treat themselves as sexual subjects, or the bloody representation of female rage. But the logic and storytelling is too convoluted — conflating kink-shaming, homophobia and sexism without teasing out the nuance of how or why these individuals are burned at the stake by the mob. That may be representative of the chaotic random evil of an anonymous attacker, and the hateful hetero white male mob, but visually, Levinson makes clear his target. He and cinematographer Marcell Rév, who establish a leering gaze directed at the girls’ nubile bods, take much delight in wringing every sexy moment out of attacking young women, shooting scenes of violence that are gratuitously pornographic. This is common in the horror genre, but this goes above and beyond. And the difference is that Dario Argento never ended his films with a bone-headed lecture about feminism. At the end of the film, Lily live-streams herself talking about the ways in which she’s been given orders as a girl, to be both sexy and pure, to never speak up or fight back, and for a quick second, an army of girls fall in line with their new leader. So the film both objectifies her and makes her deliver a speech about being objectified, and can’t have it both ways. That 180-degree turnaround is so contrived after the orgy of gore and booty shorts, that it can’t nail the landing on the flip from sarcasm to sincerity. This film tries to create a B-movie heightened dystopian reality where the gals get their violent comeuppance wearing matching chic vinyl trenchcoats, but the violence is all too nauseatingly real and unsettling. It’s an ugly exploitation of sexual violence in a hollow quest to indict the way our culture pathologizes female sexuality. “Assassination Nation” might argue that it’s about the internet mob, but its gaze reveals the true, lurid intention, while spewing misguided words to gesture at empowerment. We see right through you.