Description

Three lives in a small Austin neighbourhood cross paths and fall to bleeding pieces in this white-hot thriller from U.K. Fantasia favourite Simon Rumley. Erica (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER’s Amanda Fuller) lost her virginity at age 4 and is now a tough nymphomaniac with wounds across her soul. One of her conquests is rocker Franki (Marc Senter, no stranger to the Fantasia screen with his unforgettable turn in THE LOST)—along with most of his band. At her boarding house, she’s intrigued by brooding new tenant Nate (THE PROPOSITION’s Noah Taylor), a man who talks casually about torturing animals as a kid, and who clearly has even deeper problems than the ones he so starkly advertises. To reveal anything further would rock the spoiler boat hard but suffice to say, decisions and dispositions steer each of their fates towards absolute blood-spattered hell. And it has nothing to do with anything particularly romantic.

If you caught our Canadian Premiere of Rumley’s gut-wrenching THE LIVING AND THE DEAD several years back, then you need no introduction to the slamming emotional force of his unique brand of filmmaking. RW&B takes it to the next level, eschewing the hallucinatory hysteria of his previous outing in favour of a harsher, gritty realism that’s nonetheless infused with the disorienting atmosphere of a waking dream. Billed as “a slacker revenge movie”, RED, WHITE & BLUE is a violent, challenging film about retribution that plays out in the darkest shadowlands between black and white. Rumley offers no safe haven for the conscience of his audience, choosing instead to address the moral complexities of revenge in a manner which might ultimately have the film be likened to a punch-drunk version of a Park Chan-wook outing. Fuller, Taylor and Senter are revelations. Rumley has always been gifted with performers, but here he casts three actors riskily against type and emerges with performances that will convince you these were roles that each were born to play. Equally hard-edged and tenderhearted, RW&B has already been compared to the uncompromising works of such disparate filmmakers as Larry Clark, Sam Peckinpah and Wes Craven. It is about the horrors that people are capable of when they take action in the confused clarity of extreme emotional pain, and it will get to you in no small way. Ultimately, the less prepared you are going in, the better. After all, as the film so brutally illustrates, preconceptions can lead to horrible things…

—Mitch Davis