Low budget Blue Ruin is an expertly told suspense boiler

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      Starring Macon Blair. Rated 18A.

      It’s hard to say if Blue Ruin is an indie art movie disguised as a crime thriller or the other way around. Whatever it is, this ominous, occasionally violent meditation on family honour and gun worship is a model of expert storytelling on a very limited budget.

      Acting as his own cinematographer, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier progresses from his splattery debut film, 2007’s Murder Party. In its unadorned realism, this breathlessly paced tale resembles Carl Franklin’s groundbreaking One False Move, from 1992, with a backwoods-gothic whiff of Winter’s Bone thrown in.

      It takes a while to meet the evil Cleland clan, but their crimes mean everything to Dwight Evans (Macon Blair), a bearded, beachfront vagrant who seems harmless, but can be resourceful when homeowners aren’t looking. When he learns that the worst Cleland is getting out of prison, Dwight fires up his rusty clunker and drives from Delaware to rural Virginia, intent on revenge.

      His plan isn’t well thought-out, exactly, and after a haircut and wardrobe change that transforms him from street messiah to anonymous cubicle worker, he warns his estranged sister that the Clelands—who’ve decided to keep their responses “in-house”—are on the move.

      He should have noticed that the eldest Cleland sister is played by Eve Plumb, suggesting that The Brady Bunch may have had some dark secrets, plus ammo, stashed in their suburban basement. She’s among the few sort-of recognizable faces in this homegrown effort; some will also spot Devin Ratray (one of the dopey cousins in Nebraska) as a childhood friend who comes to Dwight’s aid.

      The film strains slightly for greater meaning when hitting its inevitable finish, but along the way, Saulnier manages to subvert almost every suspense-movie cliché—proving that categories don’t always have much to say about quality.

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