The Sundance Film Festival gets formally underway in just a few hours, and already talk here on the ground is of the opening night movies. They're giving us a handful of options to choose from this time (Sadly, I wish that wasn't the case), but one everybody is excited for is I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore, which features three festival favorites all in one place.
Marking the directorial debut of Blue Ruin and Green Room's Macon Blair, the film stars Sundance queen Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood as neighbors who set out to find whoever robbed her home. The first trailer has arrived and it looks like the perfect movie for Netflix to have picked up, which may be why they did it so quickly. It's okay, betting on Lynskey always pays off in my book. Here's the synopsis:
Ruth, a depressed nursing assistant, returns from work to find dog shit on her lawn and her house burglarized, the thief having made off with her silverware and laptop. Losing faith in the police (and possibly humanity as a whole), Ruth starts her own investigation, joining forces with her erratic neighbor–and dog shit culprit–Tony. Upon locating the laptop, they trace it back to a consignment store, leading them to a gang of degenerate criminals and a dangerous, bizarre underworld where they’re way out of their depth.
Macon Blair’s outstanding debut feature has an exuberant storytelling style that’s full of personality, visual inventiveness, idiosyncratic characters, and wildly unpredictable turns. Its dark tone, deadpan humor, and increasingly blood-soaked foray into a twisted moral universe evoke the Coen brothers, but most captivating is the deeply unsettling journey it takes Ruth on, through human vulnerability and escalating violence. Once brought to tears by the notion of an infinite universe, her quest isn’t for her laptop, but for a way of processing a world that no longer makes sense to her.
Here's hoping somebody forces a title change at some point, but otherwise this has the making of an indie hit. I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore hits Netflix on February 24th.
