Mark Reviews Movies: ASSASSINATION NATION

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 21, 2018

There's a witch hunt happening in an American town called Salem, and that should give you an idea of the level of subtlety in Assassination Nation—in case the title itself isn't enough of a clue. There may be little nuance to this broadly satirical examination of what we've become as a constantly online society, but then again, there's little that's subtle about the world of the internet. For a while, writer/director Sam Levinson's movie works in presenting a scenario of increasing extremes, in which online behavior is gradually reflected upon the real world.

The most depressing thing about this particular scenario is that it doesn't seem too far-fetched—up to a point. The story revolves around a group of high school friends, who have only known a life with the internet. They share the socially acceptable details of their lives online, but they also keep folders of secret photos on their devices, have embarrassing search histories, and hope that their classmates will never read what they say about each other in private messages.

Such a way of life isn't much different from high school of past generations. Everyone had private thoughts and clandestine gossip that they only shared with select people. The difference is that, now, those thoughts and that gossip are recorded on devices that could be shared or stolen or hacked.

It's the last possibility that causes a ruckus and, later, chaos in the sleepy town of Salem. The laptops and/or phones of certain, higher-profile people in the community are hacked one by one. The information is published online and then spread by a person or two who keep an eye out for such salacious data. From there, the online rumor mill begins. Conversations are parsed with sharp and often imaginative eyes for hidden clues, deeper meanings, or cheap laughs at the expense of the participants. A compromising photo is worthy of a massive scandal, but even the more innocent images are interpreted as having some sinister context. After all, if a person is hacked, that must mean that they have something hidden that needs to be exposed.

Lily (Odessa Young), the story's 18-year-old protagonist, paraphrases a Susan Sontag quote to sum up the population's reaction to these hacks: While 10 percent of people who see it are cruel and another 10 percent are merciful, the remaining 80 percent can be swayed to react either way. What was never taken into consideration within this observation was how easy, how quickly, and thoroughly the cruel people could spread their perspective.

That's essentially how this plays out, as Lily and her best friends Bex (Hari Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), and Em (Abra) witness their lives and the whole town going to hell after a mysterious hacker starts making people's personal data available online. First, it's the mayor, whose secret sex life is mocked before his on-air suicide is turned into a joke by some of the same people. The school's principal (played by Colman Domingo) is next, and people start calling him a child molester because he has a photo of his young daughter in the tub. Shortly after, half of Salem's population is hacked, and Lily, who has been sending racy photos to the older Nick (Joel McHale) down the street, watches in real time as amateur online detectives get closer to discovering the face that belongs to the body in those pictures.

Such activities are common in certain corners of the internet, and Levinson creates a genuine sense of tension and dread as this unfolds. Within that, there are some keen insights about the ways the internet has changed people's ways of thinking and behaving. All of it in this situation is negative, from how meticulously posed public and private pictures of girls and women are picked apart with scorn by their male recipients, to how anything can become the target of a cruel joke, and to how love and sex has been defined by the images on a screen. There's a strangely insular mode of thinking that this creates in reality, personified by the way Mark (Bill Skarsgård), Lily's boyfriend, demands control over her or how Diamond (Danny Ramirez), a football player who hooks up with the transgender Bex, feels the need to hide his feelings for her.

It all turns quite menacing and horrific in ways that feel both allegorical and quite accurate, if on a slightly exaggerated level. There are lessons here, of course, most of them stated by the rational Lily, who notes that most of the negative reactions to the hacks are more a reflection of their audience than the victim. She extols the value of empathy to Bex, who can't abide the hypocritical mayor's bigoted political positions, and chides her parents for assuming the worst about the principal.

Again, there's nothing subtle about any of this, but until the third act, the movie works as a despairing thriller about perception, reality, and how easily we can turn into high-school gossipers online. It's the third act, though, that shatters all of the goodwill Levinson has established. Assassination Nation eventually corners itself with an apocalyptic vision of violent suburban chaos, in which every dark theme is heightened and every thoughtful consideration is dismissed. The lengthy climax is vicious, bloody, and punishing for no apparent reason—other than that Levinson stuck himself in that corner quite well.

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