Assassination Nation Needs a Little Less Conversation, a Little More Action

What would happen if an entire towns data—sexts, nudes, and Pornhub search histories, to say nothing of less sensational but still utterly private fare—got leaked? Mayhem, apparently—at least so far as Assassination Nation, Sam Levinsons new socially minded exploitation thriller, is concerned.

The movie is set in a sleepy suburban town called Salem, which tells you almost everything you need to know about—sorry in advance—whats at stake. Yes, were here to talk about how easily a self-righteous, hypocritical community full of otherwise good, peaceful townsfolk can be convinced, in the heat of paranoid hysteria, to turn on a group of women. Contemporary high schoolers, specifically. The film is drenched in the mockingly catchy vocabulary and style of the hashtag-blessed generation; it even opens with a sarcastically stylized but, you sense, ultimately genuine trigger warning.

Everything comes down to a quartet of high-school girls: Lily (Odessa Young), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), Em (Abra), and Bex (Hari Nef). Whether theyre the mean girls, the popular girls, or just a group of girls is refreshingly unclear—because thats not the point. What matters are their precarious relationships to other people. Lily, for example, has a boyfriend, Mark (Bill Skarsgård), whos a latent misogynist, and a married older neighbor—Nick (Joel McHale), whose daughter she used to babysit—whos listed in her phone as “Daddy.” Daddy—not Mark—is the one who gets all of Lilys playful nudes. Bex, meanwhile, is a proud transwoman with a thing for a decidedly less proud jock in her biology class; after they hook up for the first time, he demands that she keep it a secret.

Really, everyones got secrets, and records of those secrets are inevitably waiting to be discovered on our phones—which is why people start to flip when first the Republican mayor of the town and then the school principal (played by the always-good Colman Domingo), get their data leaked. Then it starts happening to students, and other adults. Soon enough, the only way to be safe from the shame of exposure, while walking down the street, is to wear a mask. Everyone may know your search history, but at least they wont know your face.

How this all adds up to Lily and the gang becoming the town outcasts, with a legion of men in ski masks hunting them down, is something Ill leave to the movie to reveal itself. But a good thing about Assassination Nation is that the anxieties it dredges up are real. Because we can all relate, or because the arc of this moral tragedy is well-worn and familiar, what works about the film is its sense of paranoia, its hysteria.

Theres a couple of great scenes, for example, after the mayor and principal are initially hacked and the public is calling for their heads, in which these men are pushed in front of a large, blank mass of angry people. The extraordinarily bright lights make them come off like deer whove just traipsed into oncoming traffic. Theres a mounting sense of social pressure—after so many scenes of seeing Lily text “Daddy” behind her boyfriends back, you naturally wonder when the other shoe will drop and she, too, will have her business made public.

That device works just fine—but the movie doesnt always know what to do with itself, like someone who feels the need to fill silence with anxious chatter. Like this years Unfriended: Dark Web, which similarly (though more terrifyingly) skewered our bad behavior online with a mob-mentality angle, Assassination Nation clearly has ideas on its mind—and awkwardly, but sometimes endearingly, it has a habit of empowering the women at its center by letting them ramble through these ideas in overwritten debate-club monologues and a droning, tone-deaf voice-over.

The movie wants to appeal to the mile-a-minute attention spans of a youngish audience; it wants to sound and feel contemporary, too, and for the women at its center to sound and feel like strong, capable, brassy young women. The sharp-tongued Nef, especially, is full of “Fuck you” attitude and fearless sexuality, in a performance that adamantly refuses to be your token queer.

Maybe this is why Assassination Nation only really gets good once it finally escalates, when it relaxes the thematic speechifying and takes a grimy, bloody turn. At its best, its a funny but still morally keyed-in exploitation movie, capably toeing the line between outright classlessness and high-minded, politicized thrills. Picture a rape-revenge movie, but rather than physical assault, the original crime is starting shit on the Internet.

Thats Assassination Nation in a nutshell: a good idea. And it manages, just barely, to work. Its overdone, overwritten—but just original enough to be satisfying when it counts.

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