Misanthrope: crime thriller or political film?

Misanthrope: crime thriller or political film?



Misanthropeat the center of the evil in our societies

Almost ten years later it is truly remarkable The new savagesArgentine director Damián Szifron makes his English-language debut with Excellent Misanthropea high-concept American thriller that tells the hunt for a mass murderer in Baltimore. A crime thriller that is fiction, brought forward by Shailene Woodley and Ben Mendelsohn, but which strikes at the heart of the contemporary problems of Western society. Then we can ask ourselves the question: Misanthrope it’s a crime thriller or a political commentary ? Spoiler: it’s both, and it’s its political outlook that makes this crime film unique.

A “classic” thriller.

Misanthrope it’s part of the tradition of stalking films, a tradition in which productions please The silence of the lambs, Seven, Zodiac, Memories of murder or the recent Limbo. Here, a duo of policemen, the street cop Eleanor Falco and FBI veteran Geoffrey Lammark set out to find a mass killer, a precision shooter who killed 29 people one evening in a Baltimore apartment building.

Their investigation, interrupted by media coverage and by authorities seeking to protect their reputations and interests, will lead to more dramatic events. The facts are difficult to clarify, because the killer is wanted an atypical profileneither terrorist nor pervert, neither mad nor fundamentally evil.

Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley) – Misanthrope
Eleanor Falco (Shailene Woodley) – Misanthrope ©Metropolitan Filmexport

Misanthrope it keeps the audience in suspense and succeeds in its bet because it understands and uses it perfectly the codes of the detective genre. It’s all there: a surprising pair of detectives, shootings and interrogations, complicated investigations by incompetent or personally interested superiors, and a psychological mystery to solve: we have to penetrate the mind of the killer, and since she has a particular profile, the young Eleanor Falco he’s the best to do it…

But where Misanthrope go to the next level, proposing a painting of a society as the killer sees itthat is to say, a completely rotten society, devoured from within by its greed, its wickedness, its violence and its standardization to which capitalism forces.

An unstoppable political news

It is indicated quite early Misanthrope that the killer did not target a particular type of population, did not try to make his victims, chosen at random, suffer, and that for the rest he is meticulous. So instead of attacking people, he seems to be against it a sistem that the murderer does his deeds. If we maintain this idea during the discovery of Misanthropein which all its sequences participate document this system.

There is placesas important for investigation and narrative as symbolic : a residential tower, a shopping mall, a recycling center and an animal slaughterhouse. These four places symbolize, in disorder, a capitalist chain : a place of life, a place of consumption, a place of destruction and a place of production.

Jack McKenzie (Jovan Adepo) – Misanthrope
Jack McKenzie (Jovan Adepo) – Misanthrope ©Metropolitan FilmExport

There is the various suspects. First the young high school student who, martyred at school and fascinated by violence, pressured by the police, throws himself out of the window. Then the painters who worked in the apartment from which the murderer carried out his massacre, precarious workers subjected to a brutal economic system.

There is the “general” population.. In the shopping center, while the killer goes there only to look for clothes, wash and eat, he is first reported to a maintenance worker by a customer who finds who is ashamed let him wash himself in the toilet. Shortly thereafter, as he picked up food left on a tray at a fast-food restaurant, she was mocked by two women sitting at a nearby table.

There is also the mediatraditional and digital, they jump on the topic to conquer the public by creating an artificial monstrosity, and in doing so they make the situation even more explosive and dangerous.

American society laid bare

Misanthrope He thus denounces the capitalist system and, to express its best criticism, illustrates it through its strongest incarnation: American society. This is why the film shows a society invaded, drowned, suffocated Weapons. Old weapons that the government has lost track of, weapons on the belts of white supremacists, weapons that hurt children and are used to kill dozens of innocent people…

This criticism also comes to life in the film itself. In fact, during the dinner scene, Geoffrey Lammark and her husband discuss the actions of the United States. The former sees benefits while the latter sees only curses. Finally, and this is undoubtedly the most contemporary and new direction of this criticism, the phenomenon of addiction it is central in Misanthrope. And it speaks directly to the opioid crisis that has been affecting American society for more than a decade.

All these elements are voluntarily evocative of a contemporary collective tragedy of which the background and main subject are Misanthropecreate this an excellent crime thriller. And one of the best films released in 2023.

Source: Cine Serie

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