Assassination Nation

Assassination Nation

Sam Levinson’s “Assassination Nation,” a 17th century Salem witch trials meets Mean Girls Gone Wild by way of Twitter feed, is needlessly self-serious and relentlessly gory. The protagonist is Lily (Odessa Young), an 18-year old high school senior who has no time for anyone’s bullshit. She wears “Fatal Attraction” socks for fun and kiddies’ arm floats at the pool for no reason, her aura of indifference so strong that when she is called into the principal’s office after drawing pornographic images in class, she shrugs it off at first.

Then, she embarks on a feminist defense of her art as an expression of how impossible it is for women to exist in the misogynistic hell scape of selfie obsessed social media: “It’s not about the nudity,” she tells her genuinely curious teacher. “It’s about the thousands of naked selfies you took to get just one right.”

Her principal (Colman Domingo) lets her off with a gentle warning and a suggestion that maybe she is just too smart for her own good (though honestly, even having heard Lily make this argument at length twice now, I still cannot tell you what it means or why I should appreciate the messiness of this movie around it).

It’s not that Lily is wrong social media is sexist and toxic and guilty of setting impossible standards and all that damning stuff in between; she does come close to articulating, through nudity (in this scene) and other ways, that sex doesn’t necessarily equate to sexuality. It’s just that her drawings do not seem to make any point within range of her plea but then again neither does “Assassination Nation,” which like Lily seems very concerned about our fake lives online without knowing how to articulate real thoughts into full sentences anywhere near them. So instead it becomes more like a checklist of serious issues that only speaks, like Lily does, in buzzwords without ever going deep on any one theme.

And right from the start, Levinson’s film allows itself this freedom to be an everything at once table of contents that says nothing at all. Narrator Lily (brave Odessa Young) gives us a trigger warning before she tells the story of how her town Salem (get it?) “lost its motherfucking mind” (her words).

She says we should expect sexism, racism, homophobia, male gaze, swearing, rape attempt, blood guts and awfuls galore in this tale of overnight survival also featuring her three best friends: Bex (Hari Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse) and Em (Abra). And off we go: We lounge with them during their philosophical gossip sessions; walk with them through the inexplicably dark hallways and auditoriums of their school; feel our way into their superficial senior lives through feverish cinematography and a numbingly busy soundtrack.

Simultaneously, we were able to look at the anonymous texting of Lily with a suspicious person named Daddy maybe because it’s risky or affirming (or both) she sends him naked pictures in exchange for suggestive compliments. However, there is one thing: an online vigilante seems to be running rampant around town with his vendetta against anyone corrupt. And so the hacking has begun! A dishonest conservative politician falls first.

Then, the same unfair fate meets a good-natured school principal. Finally, after exposing a village wide digital Burn Book and spreading its pages like an online virus with irreversible consequences the relentless hacker lands on Lily and almost half of Salem along with her.

Eventually becoming victims themselves of the townspeople’s terrifying hatred and homicidal acts but not before being chased down by masked men through their very own neighborhoods; one might say that this film takes a page out of “The Purge” book. As attacks upon them intensify throughout Salem witches are hunted down left right center turning into full-on thriller where our vengeful heroines can do nothing less than arm up.

Throughout “Assassination Nation,” Levinson visually runs wild references range from Quentin Tarantino to ‘80s slasher films and even “American Beauty” with lots of red, split screens and showy slow motion shots thrown in for good measure. The style is so hyperactively overbaked that it already feels passé despite its topicality; underneath all these convoluted layers lurks what could have been an interesting movie about today’s unforgiving Internet mob mentality.

While he may miss his mark on good intentions as feminist and inadvertently (yet still problematically) introduce “good guys with guns” into story, Levinson does seem to have undercooked something here about contemporary mass hysteria. It’s too bad it gets drowned out in end by all that noise, which attacks your senses from every side like an online mob.

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