Jamie M. Dagg’s Sweet Virginia opens with a shot of clouds over the green mountains of British Columbia (substituting for Alaska) as a foreboding score by Brooke and Will Blair (Blue Ruin) begins. It’s daybreak, but something bad will happen soon. In his second feature film, Dagg (River) has created an atmospheric, moody and tightly controlled neo-noir. Recalling the crime dramas of the Coen Brothers, the film should put the director on the map with the likes of fellow genre filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier.
Named after the motel that some of its downtrodden characters inhabit, Sweet Virginia is set in motion by a murder-for-insurance plot gone wrong. Lila (Imogen Poots) hires Elwood (Christopher Abbott) to kill her husband, pub owner Mitchell (Jonathan Tucker), but two of her husband’s poker buddies get killed in the process. Even worse, Lila learns that Mitchell was bankrupt and she is now stuck with an assassin circling her until he gets his money.
Meanwhile, at the motel where he’s staying, Elwood strikes up conversations with Sam (Jon Bernthal). A weary manager and ex-rodeo champion. Sam happens to be having an affair with Bernadette (Rosemarie DeWitt), whose husband was one of the men Elwood killed. The deaths seem to bond Lila and Bernadette in shared tragedy, but Lila may have an ulterior motive, eyeing the motel safe, and she soon lets Elwood in on this new target.
The script by Benjamin and Paul China is potentially schematic as these small town lives all too conveniently intersect, but under Dagg’s guidance, the cast sells every plot mechanism and word of dialogue with lived-in naturalism. Captivating and unpredictable, Abbott (It Comes at Night) stands out as a socially awkward killer who fails to pick up on basic social cues. A compulsive liar, you wonder if anything he says is true. Bernthal, such a formidable villain on “The Walking Dead,” is here an insecure Everyman who doesn’t want to assume the worst in people. In what is perhaps the film’s least sympathetic role, Poots brings an effective tragedy to a jilted wife that has become paranoid and withdrawn.
In this world, violence is never indulgent, just part of a gruesome job in a setting of natural beauty. Cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné gives the film an unusual color palette for a neo-noir, with the deep greens of surrounding pine trees echoed by green interior walls and furniture. Wood paneling, wall-to-wall mirrors and dimly lit locations evoke the alienation of violent, desperate men and women.
Although certain characters do get their comeuppance, the filmmakers treat them with a warmth that transcends the genre. Dagg and Gagné carefully observe faces full of pained regret as they seek light from dark nights and rooms. You want these people to win, despite their imperfections. Through its evocative visuals, baroque score, lean dialogue and accomplished ensemble, Sweet Virginia unfolds into a modestly satisfying contemporary neo-noir that makes you look forward to Dagg’s next genre exercise.
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