Best thing you’ll see all week: I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

The centerpiece, heart, and bedrock of Macon Blair’s playfully blood simple black comedy is actress Melanie Lynskey. She plays the sweetly aggrieved Ruth, suffering the injustices of daily life with baby-faced resolve (you’d never guess it’s been nearly 25 years since Heavenly Creatures). She comes home from work every day to drink Coors, read Game of Thrones, and seethe about how everyone is an asshole. Something’s got to give.

There’s a subtle point almost hidden in Blair’s script. I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore begins on the day Ruth stops taking medication for anxiety and depression. It’s not a decision she intended. The movie doesn’t even call attention to it. But given her terrible day, given that her anxiety and depression are abruptly unchecked, no wonder her mid-life crisis is of existential proportion. No wonder she breaks down at the fact of astronomical insignificance. No wonder the movie has an Alice in Wonderland quality. When percocet and religion briefly enter the picture, it just gets curiouser and curiouser.

This is where Blair’s second act introduces a picaresque cast of white trash villains and accomplices, with Elijah Wood and David Yow as standouts. The location happens to be Portland, but the setting could be any red state with a Green Room off in the woods. Ruth is to rural America what Jeff Goldblum is to Los Angeles in Into the Night, or Jeff Daniels to New York City in Something Wild: having a midlife crisis and liable to do something reckless.

It’s a little eerie how physically similar Lynskey is to Macon Blair in Blue Ruin. They could be siblings. They both have the same dejected brown-eyed soulfulness. You just want to hug them. “You have such beautiful black little eyes,” someone tells Ruth.

“Okay,” she allows politely.

Lynskey is also in XX, a pretty good horror anthology, called XX because the five directors are women and chromosomes don’t make for confusing movie titles at all. Annie Clark’s segment, The Birthday Party, is mostly a set-up for a punchline, but it works because it’s focused on Lynskey playing the same kind of sweetly aggrieved and eminently watchable protagonist. I mean, seriously, sit Lynskey in front of the camera, set it to a soundtrack, and you’re 90% of the way to a movie.

Blair is a little unsteady getting his footing on the tightrope of black humor. Sometimes I Don’t Feel at Home pinwheels its arms and sways more Napoleon Dynamite than Fargo. But when it’s poised on that razor’s edge of Fargo, it’s dead-on. For instance, few movies manage the endearing inanity of Lynskey’s exchange with David Yow during a climactic showdown. And Blair knows how to orchestrate nutso sequences of unintended action and unexpected consequence. Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Rube Goldberg, and the NRA would be proud.