Every American presidency gets the extreme horror film that it deserves, and the Maga-era US has now got Assassination Nation, which could as well be called Confrontation Nation or Indignation Nation – a new spin on the Salem witch hysteria, a full-on splattery meltdown far from Arthur Miller, written and directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Sam Levinson.
A mysterious hacker (whose IP address discloses a location in Moscow, of all places) gets access to the internet search histories, digital photos and text conversations of everyone in the respectable American town of Salem – and proceeds to dump them online, thus revealing how, in 2018, people’s private lives and imaginations have become extensively pornified by the internet.
A mayoral candidate and a high-school principal are soon forced to resign in disgrace, to politically resonant screams of “Lock. Him. Up! Lock. Him. Up!” The outraged male mob needs a scapegoat for the hacking and its paranoid hive mind decides the guilty party must be female. This is bad news for one teenage girl, revealed by nude photos in the data dump to be a groomed abuse victim of the middle-aged man next door. The groupthink rage is channelled towards this girl and her friends, who are in turn inevitably transformed into exploitation-fantasy ninja avengers in matching red plastic macs. Soon everyone is slithering in a morass of blood and ambiguous sexual politics.
Levinson cheekily begins his movie with an onscreen “trigger warning” list of everything that could outrage your whiny liberal-snowflake sensibilities, including violence, homophobia, torture and the male gaze – in each case with a glimpse of the horror still to come. (“Transphobia” isn’t included however; a trans woman is abused with guys saying “Tie her up!” so there’s no misgendering.) That list is either reckless or very careful: a coolly calibrated, pre-emptive strike against ideological objection.
The movie’s emotional core is the targeted group of high-school friends including Lily (Odessa Young), whose messed-up relationship with the creepy older guy who once employed her as a babysitter is exposed. By being pressured into sexting, she has created a trove of hackable evidence on her smartphone that somehow incriminates her, not him. Her supportive friends are Bex (Hari Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse) and Em (Abra) and this quartet are not averse to doing a full Sex-and-the-City four-abreast walk into school to show how badass they are.
The only grownup male who shows any kindness to Lily is the unhappy school principal (Colman Domingo), who at first wants to punish her for creating porn images for art classes, but is forced to concede the feminist eloquence of her explanation: this is her critique of misogyny in the online age. There is a small role for Maude Apatow – daughter of actor Leslie Mann and director Judd Apatow, and a regular on HBO’s Girls – as their friend Grace.
Assassination Nation has got a little of the teen satire of Heathers, and there’s a sense memory of 90s-00s suburban pictures such as Election, American Beauty and Ghost World. The bacchanalian violence belongs to a different type of movie – something like The Purge – and this, for me, is much less interesting, and infused with a weirdly humourless kind of black comedy.
There’s one thing which Assassination Nation does confront, a very important part of contemporary life that most cinema conspires to ignore: the internet and how lives are lived online. Privacy has become compromised, or maybe even abolished. At any rate, the notion has evolved into something dangerously permeable, while we behave as if nothing has happened, entrusting more and more of our private lives to a globally accessible platform. Assassination Nation has got some gross-out chutzpah, and the surreal marching band scene over the final credits is inspired.
