I Blame Society (2021 | USA | 85 minutes | Gillian Wallace Horvat)
Dark times tend to give birth to dark comedies. And I Blame Society (premiering on VOD February 12) is one dark, dark comedy. It’s also very, very funny.
Gillian (co-writer/director Gillian Wallace Horvat), an aspiring LA filmmaker struggling to build a steady income at her chosen craft, has a lightbulb moment when two friends tell her she’d make a great murderer. Based on this backhanded compliment, she decides to make a documentary about, yes, planning the perfect murder. Over the course of three years, the project’s pushed to the side as she works on scripts and endures pitch meetings.
But fate, and a roll call of textbook show-business jerks, intervene. Gillian’s manager drops her when the screenplay she’s written about Israel at his behest, turns out too political. Two producers invite her to develop pitch decks for a film, more out of empty tokenism than in recognition of her talent. Her pal Chase (Chase Williamson, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Horvat) tells her he’s just gotten engaged to his emotionally manipulative (and despised by Gillian) girlfriend. Even Gillian’s ostensible nice-guy boyfriend Keith (Keith Poulson) negates his exhortations of ally-hood when he goes on a rant about the female filmmakers he’s working for as an editor. The combined stresses and frustrations induce Gillian to self-actualize and resume filming her documentary about the perfect murder. And she decides to really, really, really commit to the subject.
Gillian starts small, stealing cough syrup from a drugstore to get her adrenaline going. Ever the hard-working pleaser, she finds inspiration in a sorta-accidental death and soon vaults into her own serial killing spree, capturing her MO and action steps on camera in amusingly earnest DIY fashion. Poison starts out as her medium of choice, but soon she’s implementing much more hilariously grotesque methods (word to the squeamish: Your mileage will vary greatly once the movie hits the halfway mark).
In case the above blanket scenario doesn’t make it abundantly clear, I Blame Society doesn’t break an enormous amount of new ground. The central premise of someone taking the act of murder from academic abstract to concrete realization was a dramatic staple in film and literature for ages by the time Alfred Hitchcock popularized it in a couple of his best movies. POV faux-documentaries have been done to death (no pun intended) over the last three decades, and satires exploring Hollywood’s soul-sucking absurdity from the inside represent their own sub-genre.
But it only takes a few minutes for the movie to hit its stride, and for its maker to carve out a sensibility that’s distinctively her own. Horvat’s a winning comic presence who manages the very difficult balancing act of being howlingly funny, compulsively watchable, and strangely sympathetic—even as she becomes increasingly unhinged. As a director, she’s really adept at delivering visual punchlines that land as well as the verbal ones. The sharp script that she’s penned with Williamson hits its targets effectively, with a stinging and refreshing feminist angle that never feels preachy or forced. And the movie’s surplus of tangential gags leveled at boomers, the US health care system, and female and male egos (among other targets) connect like comic sucker-punches.
Horvat’s not afraid to turn her satiric gaze inward either—right out of the gate, Gillian the character is as needy, neurotic, and creepy as she is funny. But Horvat the filmmaker also makes a sardonically amusing case for how the mental descent of her protagonist walks hand-in-hand with the dark beast that is patriarchy. She never totally lets herself, and by extent the audience, off the hook, even amidst the cathartic satisfaction—and the abundant belly laughs—that result when Gillian literally sticks it to her real and perceived enemies. That means this very dark comedy is as wise as it is funny. And it is very, very funny.
I Blame Society premieres on VOD February 12. Photo credit: Cranked Up Films.