Violence Haunts Every Moment of Jeremy Saulnier’s Thrilling Rebel Ridge

Not long after we first glimpse Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), huffing it on a mountain bike down a vaguely and deeply Alabamian road—Iron Maiden in his headphones blocking out every sound but his breath—he’s knocked to the ground. The impact is sudden and vicious, even with a cop cruiser just out of focus seconds before, looming and swerving behind Terry’s rear tire. That anxiety persists through the rest of Rebel Ridge like a low hum in the pit of one’s stomach. Violence waits impatiently, haunting every moment.

Terry’s on his way to post $10,000 bail for his cousin, held under a seemingly ludicrous amount of money for a possession misdemeanor, when his bike’s bumped from behind, spilling him onto the pavement. Sprawled out on his belly, Terry tries calmly to explain to the vaguely and deeply southern cop (David Denman), despite the taser pointed at him, that he couldn’t originally hear the car because of the music in his ears. Another shorter but proportionally more obstinate southern cop (Emory Cohen) arrives much too quickly to have been requested as backup. Terry knows where this is going; his firmly set jaw and glaring, fathomless eyes betray nothing but a man fully in control of himself, lest this situation gets out of control.

Regardless, just as suddenly as his bike was pushed out from under him, the situation upends. The cops find $36,000 in his backpack, a search they justify by claiming that Terry resembles a drug dealer on the loose, holding him cuffed in their cruiser because he apparently evaded the first cop’s attempts to pull him over. None of this is true, of course; we know nothing about Terry other than that, in contrast to the cops’ smug abuse and Terry’s superhuman politeness, we naturally believe him when he claims that $10,000 is for his cousin’s bail and the remaining $26,000 is for a truck they’ll buy so they can start hauling boats together (even showing the cops the advertisement for the used truck). Because, like Terry, we know where this is going. You don’t get to live in this country in 2024 and not know where this is going. Isn’t this what Civil War is about? Haven’t seen it.

But even Terry seems a bit surprised when the cops confiscate the money, describing the time-consuming, court-sanctioned venues Terry could pursue to get it all back, which they’re taking—all $36K—as part of the aforementioned drug-dealer-ish investigation. Terry’s pissed, of course, and maybe even showing signs of desperation at the corners of his pursed lips, because he needs to post bail before his cousin is transferred to a different prison, where his cousin will almost definitely be murdered for ratting out some former associates. He stays still. Released with a warning and no money, Terry bikes feverishly to the Shelby Springs courthouse, where law clerk Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) teaches him about the insidiousness of civil asset forfeiture and clues him into the obvious corruption running through the roots of this small, vaguely and deeply southern Alabama town.

Terry’s shitstorm with the Shelby Springs police only builds, of course. Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s films are never shy about abrupt savagery born from endlessly escalating suspense. Both Blue Ruin and Green Room assemble whole cosmologies of tension around the series of decisions that must be made by people totally unprepared for the graphic afterbirth of very simple violence. In Green Room, Pat (Anton Chekhov) and his poor touring punk band are so callously unready for the slaughter to greet them at a white supremacist bar in rural Oregon (go figure) that they cover Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” for a room full of skinheads. The nightmare that follows, involving attack dogs and disembowelment and several gruesome arm wounds, isn’t the direct result of their song choice, but punks aren’t known for self-preservation either.

Terry, however, is trained in self-preservation, as Saulnier slowly reveals a military backstory the further Terry unearths, with Summer’s help, the extent of police corruption in Shelby Springs. Unlike Pat and his band, Terry doesn’t have the excuse of white privilege or the reassuring knowledge that middle class midwestern parents are back home waiting to send him money, but it also means he can sense the timbre of this situation for the dangerous mess it is. Soon he meets Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson, impeccably assholish), the man’s stellar, self-proclaimed “shit-eating grin” occluded by a dollop of chaw, and begins to see the contours of truth emerge from all the legal jargon and systemic precedents that keep a man like Burnne afloat with a lavish operating budget and margarita machines. As perhaps a flexing of Saulnier’s own operating budget, James Cromwell dips in with a silly Dixie twang.

Rebel Ridge is Saulnier’s second film for Netflix after 2018’s dreamy, dreary Hold the Dark. An open riff on First Blood, with shades of the 1973 Joe Don Baker vehicle Walking Tall, Rebel Ridge also feels like a determined return to the relentlessness of Saulnier’s first films. But as Terry’s plans unravel and contingencies disappear, Saulnier doesn’t double down on the grisly nature of Terry’s fate. Instead, with Pierre’s disarmingly symmetrical face carrying the majority of Rebel Ridge’s frames, the writer-director’s never been more restrained. Without breaking into gnarly gore like in Green Room, nor surprising with a burst skull or two like in Blue Ruin, the film barrels forward heedlessly, every conversation, interaction and inevitable smoke-swathed shoot-out about the way power is wielded and manipulated between characters. Even steeped in political commentary, Rebel Ridge is breathlessly staged. 

Aided by cinematographer David Gallego, Saulnier sticks primarily to Pierre’s point of view, revealing the world around him in mirrors, through car and clerks’ windows, and between door frames, limning his indelible presence in countless layers of bureaucracy and making him walk, via unshowy long takes, down old hallways whose décor seems designed to crush the human spirit. Yet, information and context gather in every shadow, the pasts of characters and the town’s moral shape slowly brought to light. Like Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy, or the Jack Reacher book series, about a mysterious loner coincidentally caught in the deadly drama of a small town, Rebel Ridge feels cut down to its essentials.

And like another great Western from this year, Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, Rebel Ridge is both punctuated and haunted by violence. Later in the film, Terry admits his plans to Summer. “I gotta haunt these motherfuckers myself,” he says, which is a very cool thing to say, but also a statement of purpose. He will not let them forget what they’ve done. If anything, that’s the making of an incredibly satisfying straight-to-streaming genre film from a burgeoning master auteur that will, within a week of release, disappear under a new pile of content on its own service. God bless, America.

Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Writers: Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Aaron Pierre, AnnaSophia Robb, Don Johnson, David Denman, Emory Cohen, James Cromwell
Release Date: September 6, 2024 (Netflix)

Dom Sinacola is a Portland-based writer and editor. He has a blog on Werner Herzog movies, The Werner Herzblog, and he’s also on Letterboxd.