One marriage, two movie reviews: I Blame Society
30 Apr, 2021 08:00 PM
4 minutes to read
I Blame Society. Photo / Supplied
By: Greg Bruce, Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie
Greg and Zanna watch a murderous rampage.
SCORES
Likeability of patriarchal norms in moviemaking: 0
SHE SAW I was looking forward to watching I Blame Society, and only partially because of its very efficient running time of 84 minutes. It s school holidays, I have three kids and I work from home, I don t have time to spend three hours languishing in front of some creative genius masterpiece. Film-maker Gillian Horvat on the other hand is so efficient she shot the whole film in 12 days, which is indicative of the film s microbudget, which speaks to the low-fi aesthetic, which all plays perfectly into the premise of the film: an aspiring filmmaker sets out to make a no-budget documentary about how she would hypothetically commit the perfect murder but things take a turn when she becomes an
So, I guess we welcome Gillian Horvat s I Blame Society with open arms, and then maybe appreciate just what the cash-poor and idea-rich Horvat has done here. This is a film gone meta-within-meta, as Horvat, playing herself as a struggling film-maker, filming herself planning the perfect murder as a plot for a mockumentary and then committing . anything but. Horvat s journey, from frustrated writer/director, enduring meetings with exactly the type of vapid young male dude-bros we all secretly imagine do run large parts of Hollywood, to stalker and then – possibly – accidental killer of her own best friend, is traced out in a series of mostly hell-funny and oddly likeable vignettes.