Red State

Synopsis: Three high-school friends (Michael Angarano, Nicholas Braun and Ronnie Connell) discover a woman online who agrees to have sex with them. When they meet Sara (Melissa Leo) in the flesh, they discover she has different plans for them. Drugged and bound, they find themselves captives of the Five Points Church and its mad preacher, Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).

Unfairly, Red State is probably going to be described as the film where Kevin Smith grew up. Unfairly, because even though he’s famous for slacker comedies full of obscenity and gross-out laughs, they’ve almost all been smart as well. Dogma is one of the most slyly intelligent analyses of faith out there, and Chasing Amy has insightful things to say about sex and the male ego. But there’s always been the Smith schtick. Rapidfire dialogue, smart-alec one-liners, and a general casualness to the whole thing that makes it easy to miss the cleverness lurking beneath.

Red State has none of that. If you didn’t know it was a Kevin Smith film, you’d have no idea that it was. Red State is a dark satire more than an out-and-out horror movie, but it’s definitely in the ballpark. People are offhandedly killed while pleading for their lives, injustice follows injustice and most horrifyingly of all, it’s completely plausible. While the plot of a torture porn film like Hostel is theoretically possible, Red State feels completely real. The psychotic Abin Cooper and his family of followers are just a heightened version of the equally creepy (and real) Westboro Baptist Church, famed for picketing just about anything and everything and blaming the decline of America on homosexuals (incidentally, the “Church” is the subject of two documentaries by Louis Theroux that are well worth seeking out.) The sense of reality extends to the cinematography, with handheld shots mostly being used, and the drawn-out scenes of Cooper’s preaching giving us an extremely creepy introduction to the murderously fundamentalist ideals of the church. But then the law catches up with them, and everything hits the fan.

Drawing on memories of Waco and the fate of the Branch Davidians, Red State shifts gears into a siege film where the victims are caught with nowhere to go. Once Agent Keenan (John Goodman) of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms gets involved, things go to hell. Just like the ATF did to the Branch Davidians, here they proceed to shoot up the entire place as the Five Pointers fire back. Keenan seems to be the only sane human being in the entire film, but he’s hamstrung by orders to cover up the whole incident. The ruthlessness of both sides, along with the trapped-in-the-middle hostage and the children of the cult, gives real tension as the victims try to find a way to survive the gun battle. The refusal of Smith to give in to any kind of easy way out for them is genuinely shocking. The ruthlessness of the storytelling is quite a thing. The surreal way he finally does resolve the situation is equally clever, though it’s sadly undermined by a weak expositional conclusion.

Red State is a great film by a director flexing his muscles and trying something different. Smith was always an intelligent filmmaker, but here he proves himself capable of a total metamorphosis.

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