 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: I Blame Society • Year: 2020 • Country: USA • Director: Gillian Wallace Horvat • Main cast: Gillian Wallace Horvat, Chase Williamson, Keith Poulson, Macon Blair • Runtime: 84 minutes • Production company: Nowhere, Brewed Media • TRAILER
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Sometimes people don’t know what they want. “Be yourself” they say sometimes, but then they are disappointed because you don’t play a more seductive role, or if you don’t say or do the things they were expecting. Or “if you wanna succeed you gotta take some risks”, but then you deliver something fresh, new, and never seen before, and yet they claim that is not what the audiences want. So, yes, Gillian is right, I agree with the protagonist of I Blame Society (2020), it is them who are to blame, she only tried to do what she is best at.
Here we are not in front of the habitual movie, this has a sincere experimental tone, a piece of meta-cinema some might say. It is not the classic narrative that we are used to what dominates the film and is the main star (also the real-life co-writer and director of the film) who is shooting all the footage we get to see in the final film. But don’t be afraid, this time is not the typical found-footage product where almost all the sequences are in first person, because the protagonist in this story is a real movie maker, with a good eye for photography, so her set of cameras will always shoot the action from the most interesting angles as possible.
As Gillian Wallace Horvat admits both in real life and her character in the movie, the whole concept of I Blame Society (2020) bloomed when some friends told her that she could make a good murderer as a compliment. Then, she decided to “make a Herzogian non-fiction-narrative hybrid documentary short in which I would ask the people who knew me best about what my most murderous traits were in typical murder settings”. That short film remained unreleased but a few years after she revamped the script to turn it into what would become her first feature film.
I Blame Society (2020) is a likable low-budget film that although deals with a subject that happen to be horrific as a cold-blooded serial killer could be is done in a comedic tone that gives the global experience a sympathetic feeling. The character played by Gillian Wallace Horvat could be described as the devilish twin sister of the homonymous character in the movie Amélie (2001), most of the time having a smile on her face no matter how bad her situation is or what horrible actions she is committing.
The biggest problem in I Blame Society (2020) is also what makes it a special film, which is the feeling of witnessing an amateur work, something incomplete. Like if this is the raw version of a final film that is yet to come. The story is original enough, and the watching experience is entertaining, the images are not so varnished which is something to assume since the protagonist is filming the events with home equipment, but the global feeling including the acting and the poor dressing of some of the locations don’t play in favor of the final product.
Despite the discouraging flaws of the movie, Shudder has achieved the exhibition rights of I Blame Society (2020) to add it to their catalog, which is another evidence that this movie has something special. It is above the average low-budget, amateur, or pseudo-amateur titles that we can find in the overpopulated selection of available films on-demand right now, so I advocate its watch if you encounter it.
RATE: 6/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11469196
