Rebel Ridge review – Aaron Pierre delivers the goods and then some

Jeremy Saulnier returns with a flinty, restrained crime-conspiracy thriller exploring small town police corruption and the one guy who they should never have messed with.

It’s funny to compare Rebel Ridge to Jeremy Saulnier’s breakout film Blue Ruin, made over 10 years ago now – both are about vagrants getting (or trying to get) their pound of flesh. Though Rebel Ridge’s Terry Richmond (a captivating, incendiary Aaron Pierre) is much more capable than Macon Blair’s character in that 2013 feature.

Also, this one isn’t quite wall-to-wall action, it’s more surgical in how it spaces out its bursts of violence. Yet even when it does, it’s a far less bloody affair than something like Blue Ruin or Green Room, or the brutal machine gun assault that features in 2018’s Hold the Dark.

This film is one-part revenge, two parts conspiracy thriller, beginning with a “legal” seizure of money that spirals out into a much more convoluted web of systemic crimes and how they’ve become codified in American law. The dialogue even touches on the terrifying militarisation of the police (“Civil unrest: it’s a growth industry.”) that enables and encourages the violence – often racial violence – they so often inflict. It also covers the gall that comes from feeling persecuted for being called out on it – the film’s sleaziest character prominently wears a ‘Thin Blue Line’ patch.

“Six foot tall former marine who lives in the woods drifts into town, takes aim at local conspiracy while shaming bullies” sounds like a Jack Reacher plot, but Saulnier’s writing and Pierre’s performance are very far from the absurdity of Reacher and his dinner-plate sized hands.

From the very beginning Rebel Ridge feels natural and rather close to home in its depiction of bureaucracy and even something as small as passive language being weaponised. Scored by a very loaded needle-drop of Iron Maiden’s ‘Number of the Beast’, the inciting incident sees a cop car deliberately knock Terry off his bike, which is written off as a “collision”, with a phoney crime made up so to take the large amount of cash on his person.

After multiple insults added to his injury, in his attempt to get his money back he’s dragged through an infuriating labyrinth of red tape on top of his encounter with the cops – who operate like a gang in broad daylight. So just like in real life.

The red tape is a problem here because Terry is short on time. He’s on his way to post his cousin’s bail to rescue him from the dangers of the state prison, and now the bail money has been locked away by the local PD. The actual mechanics of the laws involved here are beyond this film critic’s purview, but the absurdity of it feels dehumanising and real enough.

Pierre’s performance is a huge part of that feeling. He’s utterly magnetic throughout, his initial helplessness and sympathetic desperation later contrasted with how he cooly composes himself with the command of someone who is very obviously not to be trifled with. His performance, combined with Saulnier’s patient build-up of deliberate humiliations and personal slights, makes moments where Pierre delivers lines like he’s got ice in his veins all the more satisfying.

Zooming out a little, Saulnier’s genre films have all applied their rather gnarly thrills to the sparse, wide-open landscapes of American small towns, using their isolation to accentuate a rather uninviting and often unforgiving atmosphere. He proved just as adept with claustrophobic spaces, such as in Green Room (another angry, lean film about fascists).

Yet Rebel Ridge feels like the film all his previous ones were all building to, evidence of the lessons taken on from Saulnier’s previous work: dancing between tense standoffs in tight spaces; the terror of being followed up the open road. He moves purposefully between these confrontations with the film’s angry unspooling of a broken political system.

But this is the thing: as broken as it may be, things are operating as intended. All of these legalities have been manipulated into benefitting entitled, jackbooted fascists. The righteous anger at this realisation hones Rebel Ridge into a sharp and very memorable thriller, hopefully to the point that it’s seen as widely as possible.

Published 6 Sep 2024

Tags: Aaron Pierre Don Johnson Green Room Jeremy saulnier