A witty, acerbic, meta mockumentary that delivers laughs and darkness in equal measure.
Synopsis: A struggling filmmaker realizes that the skill set to make a movie is the same to commit the perfect murder.
Spurred on by an odd compliment from friends that she would make a good murderer, Gillian (Gillian Wallace Horvat, also writing and directing) sets out to make a documentary about the perfect murder. She even has a target in mind: her friend Chase’s (played by the film’s co-writer Chase Williamson) girlfriend (known only by the nickname Stalin), who she considers a perfect victim due to her casual cruelty. While her discussion with Chase about her plan understandably goes down badly, three years later and burdened by the frustration of trying to find work as a director doing political work and battling ideas about likeable female characters, Gillian picks up her camera once more for a more personal pursuit.
Tackling everything from the difficulty of making it as a female filmmaker, negotiating tricky personal relationships and trying to authentically capture the escalation of serial killer behaviour, there is a lot going on in I Blame Society. It retains a sense of cohesion through its focus on Gillian, whose one-liners, determination and at times, outright narcissism make her compelling and entertaining, especially when the wider world she finds herself in is exasperating in its performativity. Meetings with a producer duo who mangle representational buzzwords and state their preference for a ‘strong female voice’ with no actual thought of what that means in their films add to the frustration, renewing Gillian’s drive to create her own film. Her boyfriend Keith (Keith Poulson) calls himself an ally, supporting the use of female directors while also lamenting their need to collaborate more leading to longer working hours, again contextualising the boundaries she faces and setting out Gillian’s need to go it alone as a creator. The tedious need for strong female characters to be ‘likeable’ is also raised throughout, a thread that serves to make Gillian’s various transgressions feel more like a kick back against a system that places limitations on female characters it doesn’t even consider for their male counterparts.
The film plays with the boundary between criminality and art throughout with Gillian assessing her creative choices in the moment, moving a camera around a sleeping woman in a house she’s broken into is “not being creepy, it’s just a second angle”. The connection that women have to true crime stories also features here, with Gillian’s descent drawn on at least some level from media saturation on the development and acts of serial killers, affording them a level of fame. Gillian’s spiel about the Golden State Killer’s unpredictability demonstrates a knowledge of how these things ‘work’ in the eyes of media, law enforcement and the public and therefore how to subvert this for her own means. The fact that during this whole scene, she is operating her own zoom for dramatic effect lends it a sense of absurdity that the film comfortably lapses in and out of at just the right beats. Her outrage when she is almost too good at laying false clues to truly claim credit for her work feeds further into her self-obsession.
Peppered with excellent soundtrack moments, commentary on film style choices and a wider satire on the treatment of serial killers in the media and among law enforcement, this is a film with bite. The truly impressive thing though is despite the gradually darkening tone, there are still laugh out loud moments that keep the film engaging. Gillian Wallace Horvat makes for an charismatic central figure, part-Patrick Bateman monologue, part-neurotic artist whose quirks devolve into outright cruelty throughout the film’s progression.
I Blame Society is a sharply written, endlessly entertaining and bold film that hinges on an excellent performance from Horvat that despite its specific focus on filmmaking almost certainly holds wider appeal.
Blue Finch Film Releasing presents I Blame Society on Digital Download 19 April
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