Assassination Nation centers around a quartet of unapologetically shallow teen girls more concerned with getting likes on Instagram than decent grades. Lily (Odessa Young), Bex (Hari Nef), Em (Abra), and Sarah's (Suki Waterhouse) lives are turned upside down when half of the population of their home town is hacked, and all their data made public. The quartet, and Lily in particular, find themselves at the dangerous center of a rapidly escalating situation, as the town becomes increasingly vicious and desperate.
Assassination Nation works primarily with exaggeration, as with so much great Juvenalian satire. The milieu of the film is not such as would be found in a piece of social realism, nor does it claim to be. Instead, it works to draw attention to various cultural aspects by outlandish exaggeration. Nowhere is this clearer than the film's very premise - all Er0str4tus (the hacker) has to do to destabilize the town is let everyone know what everyone else is thinking.
Director Sam Levinson sets the tone immediately. The opening shot shows a camera moving along a suburban street, passing by white picket fences of a normal suburban town, with people performing mundane tasks such as emptying the trash and watering the lawn. Except everyone is wearing a mask of some kind. A rapidly edited montage then shows a series of quick clips, each one labelled with a requisite "trigger warning", for various scenes filling the film, including Bullying, Blood, Abuse, Classicism, Death, Drinking, Drug Use, Sexual Content, Toxic Masculinity, Homophobia, Transphobia, Guns, Nationalism, Racism, Kidnapping, Murder, Attempted Murder, The Male Gaze, Attempted Rape, Sexism, Swearing, Torture, Violence, Gore, Weapons, and Fragile Male Egos. This abrasive style continues for much of the film, which is purposely designed to confront, provoke, and challenge people, not only thematically, but aesthetically.
An especially, aesthetically interesting scene occurs after the data dump, but prior to people turning on one another. Learning that her best friend has been mocking her behind her back, a friend of the central quartet takes a baseball bat, finds her friend in the school gym, and cracks her over the head. This scene is the first act of violence from which all others will follow. It starts out normal enough, but soon the camera turns upside-down and we see the girl standing against an unrealistically large American flag. Turning the camera upside-down like this mid-shot and using the flag in this way indicates that something within the social fabric has fundamentally changed.
The film's most aesthetically accomplished scene, however, is a five-minute single-take shot depicting a home invasion, with the camera remaining outside the house, following the action as it moves from window to window. It's a dazzling sequence that has the effect of positioning the audience as passive spectators. It is clear that while not a particularly fun film, Levinson did have a lot of fun in the creation of it. Between these interesting camera shots and angles and colorful set and costume design, the film is extremely aesthetically pleasing.
Aside from those already mentioned, this film tackles a ton of problems young girls are facing everyday over social media. For example, firmly of the belief that privacy is a thing of the past, Lily claims that her generation accepts that their lives are for mass consumption, and all they can do is try to choose how they are consumed. In relation to this, the film addresses the myriad ways that young girls are represented on social media, deconstructing the inherently misogynistic assumptions that underpin so many of our attitudes to online behavior (if a guy shows off his washboard abs, it's no big deal, but if a woman shows off her cleavage, she can be considered a slut).
Unfortunately, because it tries to deal with so much, many of the issues are raised only to be touched on once or twice, and then dropped. This has the side-effect of making it seem a little thematically scattershot, and it would have worked far better if Levinson had threaded a core group through the narrative rather than jumping around as much as he does. Aside from dealing with too many themes, if the film has a defining flaw, it's that the last act essentially turns into "The Purge" where the girls, as complicit as everyone else in the early part of the film, now turn into the leaders of a righteous vigilante group facing off against those who seek revenge for their privacy being made public, a conflict drawn primarily along gender lines. It's a disappointingly simplistic ending given the complexity and thematic depth of the preceding narrative.
While it is immensely strong (both hilarious and disturbing) in its depiction of teenage gender politics, gun culture, political correctness, online behavior, etc, it falters when it comes to the dynamics of the narrative, setting up several strands which never pay off, and ending a little weakly. I am rating Assassination Nation at a 5.9/10.
