Home Kills

Every shot completely goes for it, crafted to the hilt with this amazing overcast color palette from oncoming rainstorms. I recently took another film to task for having very professional but ordinary visuals, what I call non-style. Butler directs everything here with a strong visual style that serves the story but is mesmerizing in its own right. And that’s why I accept starvation rations to remain out here on the indie frontier, to catch those mavericks that use their freedom to sport style by the mile. Butler is a director with that kind of style. Well-behaved is never good enough, and Home Kills is seldom well-behaved.

The script Butler writes builds a bleak country nightmare that really takes the viewer to the edge of falling off the face of the planet. The screen bleeds black with the dead-end desperation of an old Nick Cave novel. I thought I had seen some extreme living situations in movies, but nothing prepared me for the depths of depravity that swarm through the picture like batwings. This is the true worth of a fantastic crime thriller, as it provides dark spotlights to follow the invisible backroads to Hell that lay everywhere.

“Butler directs everything here with a strong visual style… mesmerizing in its own right.”

Jones and McKenzie are excellent guides to this Netherworld, as they have entirely divergent attitudes toward their descent. They also play that classic dichotomy of the one brother who keeps cleaning up the other brother’s messes. Jones and McKenzie rock it like O’Rouke and Roberts did in The Pope Of Greenwich Village. Hazel does a phenomenal acting job here, as she can shake the screen without speaking a word. Graham pulls off one of the most realistic portrayals of a small-town cop I have seen in a movie. It is a complicated balance of antagonistic comic relief that is really quite serious.

There are some places so far away that civilization can’t save you if you f**k up. Home Kills drops the audience into a pit so deep that it would send the devil running back into the woods in fear. This is a great reminder of why we watch movies and why thrillers are named such. See it.