Cold in July

Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part, but I’ve begun to notice that more and more contemporary independent movies feel like they were made in the 1980s. The '70s have always been considered the golden age of American independent cinema, and filmmakers began paying homage to that decade almost as soon as it ended, but now we’re starting to see pictures that take place in the decade that followed, or in an ambiguous recent past that feels very much like it. Recent films like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, David Lowery’s Ain't Them Bodies Saints, and even James Grey’s The Immigrant all took me back to a more innocent time in my life, when I had seen many fewer movies and was much more capable of being surprised by the power of cinema. It’s not just that these films trade in a kind of stylistically retro-chic homage (though that is certainly the case in a film like Drive), but also that they often deal with issues and themes that were prevalent in the '80s. And if this emerging tendency to embrace the tropes and techniques of thirty years ago blossoms into an actual trend, Cold in July may be remembered as the film that solidified it.

Writer/director Jim Mickle and writer/actor Nick Damici have worked together on several previous pictures, including Mulberry Street, Stake Land, and We Are What We Are, and while Cold In July isn't a horror film like those earlier collaborations, it most certainly is a genre movie, a Western-flavored neo-noir. Digital cinematography gives the night scenes a distinctively modern look, but everything else is era-perfect: the cars, the clothes, the hairstyles, the inventively photographed depictions of violence, and the synth-heavy soundtrack that's so evocative of John Carpenter's work of the time. Still, all this period detail never overwhelms the story, or distracts us from it. Instead, it provides a foundation of authenticity, lending credibility to the over-the-top events of a crime genre film. Even if you miss the opening title that tells us we’re in East Texas, 1989, there is no mistaking we’re in a time before cellphones and the Internet (two inventions that have robbed modern small-scale crime movies of much of their mystery).

Each of the picture’s three main characters represents a different masculine archetype, all of which are familiar from countless other movies, but the lead actors inhabit these parts so well that nothing they do comes off as clichéd or false. Despite his particular looks and mannerisms, Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under, Dexter) all but disappears into the role of mild-mannered family man Richard Dane, who accidentally kills an intruder in his home one night. Sam Shepherd plays the dead man’s vengeful father, who doesn’t take kindly to Dane’s act of self-protection; as soon as Shepherd shows up, we’re sure we know exactly where this film is headed, but our expectations get upended almost immediately. And though the plot is, for the most part, preposterously implausible, we happily suspend our disbelief because Mickle and Damici have engaged us so thoroughly, and established the genre conventions so strongly. Intricate plot twists are a staple of crime pictures, but with each passing decade we have become numbed to the predictability of these contrived “surprises” just as much as we have to the extremeness of on-screen brutality. Cold In July, however, keeps us guessing about what will happen to its characters, and the fisticuff, gun blasts, and bloodshed, when they do inevitably come, are unexpected, even shocking, and eerily beautiful.

By the time Don Johnson shows up as a kick-ass private investigator who tracks down the truth about the man Dane killed, we don't just accept that a P.I. would drive the flashiest car in Texas; we love it. Iconic stars playing over-the-top roles in realistic settings without overtly winking at the audience is a convention that has almost disappeared from contemporary cinema, and indeed, as genre movies have become more self-aware over the last thirty years, they've also become less substantial and enduring. But in the tradition of films like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple, Stephen Frears’s The Hit, Michael Mann’s Thief, Carl Franklin’s One False Move, and John Dahl’s Red Rock West, Cold In July conveys complex ideas without wearing its themes and subtext on its sleeve. The characters and situations come first, and the ideas and insights only begin rising to the surface after the credits roll. And that’s the key to good genre storytelling.