Vague Visages’  Rebel Ridge review contains minor spoilers. Jeremy Saulnier’s 2024 Netflix movie features Aaron Pierre, David Denman and Emory Cohen. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Jeremy Saulnier’s two breakout films, Blue Ruin (2013) and Green Room (2015), made audiences wince via brutal crossbow attacks and rampaging neo-Nazis. The American filmmaker’s long-delayed Netflix movie, Rebel Ridge, finds even more intensity in the simple act of getting administrative documents delivered on time, blurring the lines between a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare and an Alan J. Pakula-inspired conspiracy thriller after one man questions a corrupt system. That’s Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), who — not even 60 seconds into the Netflix film — has his bike rammed off a road by a police officer. The set-up implies that what follows will be an eerily prescient update of Alfred Hitchcock’s wrong man formula, as an institutionally racist and small-time Louisiana police force targets a guy who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The irresistibly thrilling first half of Rebel Ridge, however, quickly reveals itself to be a Rube Goldberg machine with escalating consequences, as Terry has $36,000 in bail money intended for his cousin seized by authorities, forcing him to navigate a rigged legal system. The protagonist’s cousin receives witness protection after informing on his former gang members, but an upcoming jail transfer risks his life. With each tick of the clock, there’s a new form to sign, and another obstacle placed by an eternally-monologuing police chief (an excellent Don Johnson as Sandy Burnne) determined to keep Terry in his place. Rebel Ridge’s first two acts focus entirely on the protagonist’s increasingly desperate attempts to operate in good faith while goalposts are being moved in front of him, and it’s the most satisfying thing Saulnier has made this far into his career.

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Rebel Ridge’s opening chapters work largely because of Terry’s in-the-dark perspective, as it’s unclear if he stumbled on a conspiracy due to the surrounding bureaucracy. In the third act, Saulnier leans heavily into conventional crime procedural territory and shows his hand too clearly, resulting in a more straightforward — and, subsequently, less thrilling — western-inflected shoot-em-up between an innocent stranger and an entire town. The stakes are kept high enough in Rebel Ridge to ensure this pivot to more familiar territory isn’t entirely deflating, but — when considering how the opening acts feels punishing because of the realism — the climactic explosion of violence feels disappointingly like a director bending to a genre’s conventions rather than continuing to warp them to his own sensibilities. 

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The other driving force of Rebel Ridge is Pierre, who manages to convince as a put-upon civilian and an unlikely action hero. It’s a deceptively straightforward role, requiring the actor to routinely code-shift multiple times within any given scene. Take the opening confrontation, where Terry must show deference to officers while struggling to conceal his grim realization that things could go south at any moment. There’s an inherent need for him to race against the clock, which Saulnier is all too aware of, and the tensest moments monitor behavioral shifts within conversations where he needs to regain the upper hand. For a filmmaker who made his name with two hyper-violent thrillers that triggered some queasy walkouts on the festival circuit, the character-driven moments in Rebel Ridge feel like an evolution for Saulnier. There’s no violence so much as there is the pervasive threat of it, forcing the viewer to confront the worst possible scenario in any given scene, only to keep propulsively flipping the script on expectations.

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Early on in Rebel Ridge, Saulnier reveals that Terry is no everyman, and the gradual way the director teases out character backstories — with a clear distaste for anything resembling an exposition dump — is another way he manages to build out tension from the barest bones of cinematic storytelling. This isn’t a cheap trick designed purely to keep audiences in the dark, but rather a necessity to keep the character dynamics from ever feeling as complex as they are in any given moment. It’s telling that, by the time all cards have been placed on the table, the only place left for Rebel Ridge to go is to an extended action sequence, with Saulnier relying on the audience’s blurry perspective to generate the biggest shocks. It’s an entertaining end, but not a triumphant one.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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