★★★★☆
Cinematic cruelty is an understated currency these days. After all, Hitchcock founded his career on a distinct form of stylised meanness, and everyone from Brian De Palma to French auteur Claire Denis has injected their films with a squirmy kind of sadism.
Indeed, it is the shadow of Denis that falls most obviously across Trash Fire, the new film from indie horror wunderkind Richard Bates Jr. – though it should be stressed that despite the debt it owes to her stylish, scathing work, the film never feels parodic or derivative. Indeed, quite the opposite is true: Trash Fire might be the most inventive American film of the year.
The plot is bare bones, and deliberately so: the shockingly unlikeable Owen (Adrien Grenier in a career-defining 180 degree swivel away from his work on Entourage) hates his girlfriend Isabel (Angela Trimbur), his burnt-to-death parents, his downright evil and estranged grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan), his life. But when he gets Isabel pregnant, she demands that they visit his grandmaw and Owen’s disfigured sister, a survivor from the blaze that offed his folks.
What ensues is a brilliantly understated, expertly controlled leadup to one of the grottiest cinematic punchlines of recent memory. Bates Jr. reins in the vivid visual madness that defined his debut, Excision, instead choosing to focus all his talents on a kind of clinical coolness that gives the proceedings the feeling of a slow, precise autopsy. Characters stare straight down the barrel of the camera; the lighting is even; the scenes are trimmed short. Nothing lingers but everything stings.
And yet the true genius of the film comes from the various levels of unlikeability that Bates Jr. weaves together. You certainly don’t enjoy the company of any one of the characters, but you do somehow find yourself rooting for some of them – hoping that the shitheads come out on top over the fuckers – and before long the piece begins to smack of a distinctly complicit form of unkindness.
None of Trash Fire’s players are worthy of being saved – but neither are we, the audience, watching on like a gaggle of old-age pensioners peering out at a flaming car wreck, and Bates Jr. revels in a cathartic brutality that proves as infectious as the plague. To sum up Trash Fire, then? Everyone’s awful, no-one is redeemed, innocence is a lie and kindness is weakness. And ain’t that the fucking joy of it?
