Forgotten Film Friday: Assassination Nation

A review by Azzam Abdur-Rahman I am really pushing the limits of this concept for this one. This isn’t an older flick that has become forgotten by time. This isn’t something that the cultural zeitgeist moved past that I wanted to talk about nor is it something that deeply reflects my personal experiences as a child growing up and discovering films. No this week I want to talk about a movie that is so immediately violent and angry, so immediately ready to tear everything down just to show the hypocrisy of it all, and most of all so immediately visually stunning when something isn’t it is stark and shocking. Assassination Nation could be this generation’s Heathers. This is a future cult classic looking for its cult and that is what I am aiming to do today. I need to help this film find an audience because if no one does it will be forgotten. This week we are aiming to combat that. Assassination Nation is the second film from Sam Levinson and it seems like in writing this he was furiously angry. The film is about the town of Salem, a fictional city, where a group of teenage girls reveling in current joys of sex, drugs and youth become pariahs after a hacker begins releasing people's personal conversations and web browsing histories. What transpires from there is what would happen if Heathers and Mean Girls decided to blend with the bold violence of Lars Von Trier on an 80’s action film bump. This fucking movie is trying to blow the fucking windows out in every shot. The score is menacing and synthed out in the way that low-budget 80’s action films would be. The violence is brutal and unwavering in its reality. The world of Assassination Nation is an america cranked up to eleven with an overdrive pedal at high gain screaming fight riffs in your face. It doesn’t care if you like it or dislike it. It has something important to say. And what it has to say is America is an ugly place if you are a woman. Women in the world are told to fit into contrasting boxes by society. It is a bizarre split of asking for purity and silence but also asking for pure sexuality. It is something ugly that most men grow up around like it or not and it leaves women with a society always trying to tear them down for being anything but the perfect princess they are told to be. Assassination Nation is a massive fuck you to that concept. Women in this film are allowed to be sexual, the director encourages it. Women are women no matters where they start and are seen as that. One of the girls in the film is trans and her peers only see her as that. They are allowed to have their own opinions. To demand sexual satisfaction. To be angry. To be violent. To be everything society doesn’t want them to be and to be supportive of one and other. The only moment in the film where a woman harms another woman is where the person in question does malicious things to another woman for cruel reasons. On the flip Men are seen as wolves in Sheeps clothing. Happy to live within this framework where they are both the heroes and the villains. I do not want to get into that more because the film really builds on that but it is so wild. This movie needs to be seen and guess what you can watch it now. The film is on HULU currently so if you have this platform go watch it and let’s discuss it because it is warenting discussion. For the first time since I did a netflix film early in this blogs existence has a film legitimately been easy after we post it. So please give this film a shot. Open your mind and lets make this film the next Heathers.