Black Rock (2012)

The last two movies I saw, Starry Eyes (2014) and Borgman (2013) were both quite disappointing. The former, despite an outstanding performance from lead actress Alex Essoe, failed to deliver on its potential to say something interesting about contemporary celebrity culture, while the latter, despite some superficial resemblances to Michael Haneke's classic Funny Games, had neither Haneke's inventiveness nor his film's daring. I fared much better with Katie Aselton's 2012 horror-thriller Black Rock, which was partially funded through a Kickstarter project. The initial set-up is quite simple: three old friends (two of whom have been estranged from each other for some time) have a reunion on a remote Maine island where they used to vacation as children. While there, they meet three men who are hunting on the island. One of the women flirts with and kisses one of the men but when he becomes aggressive, she tells him to stop. He refuses and attempts to rape her. While defending herself, she accidentally kills him. The remainder of the film concerns the women's attempts to stay alive while the remaining men hunt them down to avenge their slain friend. So far, so predictable, one might think. But there are a couple of things that separate this film and make it memorable. The first is the fact that the three men are all Iraq/Afghanistan veterans who have been dishonorably discharged from the US Army and have recently come home. They use the skills they acquired in the military to hunt the women down, but more importantly, their depersonalization and hatred of the women is strongly connected by the film to their experiences with hunting 'Haji.' The film has important things to say, in other words, about male violence on both the domestic and international level, at times of both war and peace. Ironically, considering that the actions of the two remaining men are superficially motivated by their friendship with the man who's been killed, the other distinctive feature of the film is the friendship that bonds the three women. It's this bond that enables some of them to survive their ordeal, but only after  the two survivors come to terms with the past and overcome their estrangement, which was caused, not incidentally, by a disagreement over a man. Friendship, then, can serve as an alibi for violence and as a source of strength. All this, and a reaffirmation of the never-to-be-forgotten fact that 'No Means No,' no matter when the word 'no' gets spoken. Aselton does more in the 83 minutes of Black Rock than most films of twice its length.