Assassination Nation Is An Imperfect But Admirably Ambitious Middle Finger To The Patriarchy

If nothing else, Assassination Nation has its finger very much on the pulse of all corners of internet culture and how it impacts people, particularly my generation. It was borderline strange to hear a major theatrically released motion picture actually reference internet slang like #NotAllMen or see teenage characters engage in conversations rife with meme references or have a story that recognizes how much bigotry can be found on social media websites like Twitter. Writer and director Sam Levinson has clearly decided to make an ambitious treatise on how internet culture can amplify already existing toxic societal behaviors towards women that's fascinating to watch but sometimes stumbles in execution.


Before all hell breaks loose, Assassination Nation is just about four High School best friends in Salem, Massachusetts, a group that includes protagonist Lily Colson (Odessa Young) and her pals Bex (Hari Nef), Em (Abra) and Sarah (Suki Waterhouse). The scenes of these four just hanging out and shooting the breeze are immensely entertaining and ably sell the fact that these are people who have been best friends for ages now (woe that such scenes basically vanish for the entiriety of the second act). Even as they have fun chilling out, conflict in their daily lives is unavoidable, particularly for boundary-pushing Lily who constantly brushes up against her conservative parents and the faculty members of her High School.

Still, all of that is pretty much routine stuff until people in Salem, Massachusetts start getting hacked and all kinds of damaging personal information gets leaked, resulting in the townspeople donning masks in an attempt to maintain some anonymity and begin a bloodthirsty search for who could be behind these hacks. The fallout for this hacking constantly circles back to Lily, her friends and any other women in town who dare to have their own individual personalities beyond what the men in their lives want them to be. Assassination Nation is pretty unflinching when it comes to depicting the male Salem residents (which includes one played by Joel McHale) lashing out at women who won't just be objects for men to mold to their own liking, resulting in some truly terrifying sequences.

One of the most harrowing of these sequences sees Lily being pinned to the ground and verbally abused by her boyfriend, Mark (Bill Skarsgard, who will likely always be playing villains of some kind after he made such an excellent Pennywise) and his friends after he learns that she cheated on him. The words emerging from Mark's mouth sting with how realistically dehumanizing they are, ditto for a scene where Lily is taunted by some guy filming her on his cell phone. It shatters your soul to see Lily experience this odious behavior that's all too commonplace for women to go through in real life, especially on the internet. The amount of verbal slings and arrows Lily has to endure throughout the story make her recurring pieces of narration that lend insight into her perspective as well as her third act turn into a crusader against her town gone mad truly cathartic.

Unfortunately, Assassination Nation struggles frequently find a proper balance between condemnation and exploitation in its depiction of frequently violent sexism. For characters like Lily and Bex for instance (the latter brought to life with the films best performance courtesy of Hari Nef, what an excellent turn she gives her), they do get fleshed out as people and are allowed to provide insight into how the intentionally unpleasant to watch.torment they endure impacts them. However, supporting characters like Em, Sarah or especially Nance (Anika Noni Rose) don't get much, if any, depth, so the immense amount of violence they go through ends up making those characters feel like just punching bags that Assassination Nation can use to create more gory violence rather than as opportunities for exploration of individual experiences with grappling with societally ingrained misogyny.

Truth be told, Assassination Nation too often feels like it's approaching misogyny-driven violence in a similar manner to how The 40-Year-Old Virgin approached immature attitudes towards sex or how Quentin Tarantino movies approach racial slurs; the films themselves too often revel without thought into the very elements they're supposed to be condemning. The scattershot success of exploring how female individuality gets stamped out in society is brought to life with a visual sensibility from director Sam Levinson that's full of bright colors, cogent camerawork (though there's one extended single take late into the film that feels gimmicky in how filming this particular intense scene in this manner doesn't add much atmospherically to the sequence) and some memorable visual flourishes like a split-screen effect that allows the audience to follow three different lead characters at a party.

Levinson is swinging for the fences in both his writing and directing in Assassination Nation and the results are incredibly laudable in intent and also sometimes in execution, though there are also a number of times where it feels like Levinson has forgotten the humanity amidst the explosion-laden carnage he has the town of Salem, Massachusetts become consumed by. His best pieces of writing in the entire film may actually just come in the final two scenes, the first of which is an inspirational rallying cry from Lily that sent chills up my spine while the final capper of the entire movie ends things on an appropriately and intentionally anti-climactic note. These are two brilliant sequences that show Assassination Nation at its very best and there's enough of that kind of insightfulness (plus a phenomenal Hari Nef performance) to make Assassination Nation a flawed but admirably ambitious and fascinating curiosity.