“Blue Ruin”: A bloody, brilliant revenge thriller — salon.com

When we find out exactly why Wade Cleland went to prison, we may well root for Dwight to finish him off in as painful a method as possible, as does Dwight’s suburban-mom sister, Sam (Amy Hargreaves). But the past is rarely a straightforward matter of good and evil – not in real life, and certainly not in crime movies. We only get bits and pieces of the tangled rural Virginia history of the Cleland family and Dwight and Sam’s family, but it’s enough to make us suspect that Dwight is making the same mistake made by every tragic hero since the Greeks: He’s answering blood with blood, without really knowing or caring whether he’s in the right, and without thinking too much about the consequences. Furthermore, as in most families, not all the trauma we see in “Blue Ruin” involves physical violence. When Sam realizes that she has to take her children and flee to avoid the vengeful Clelands, she tells Dwight, “I’d forgive you if you were crazy. But you’re not. You’re weak.” Given what Dwight has already done and experienced, that’s grossly unfair, and everything he does from that point forward is meant to prove her wrong.

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