Unfortunately for Chris, the party seems to be a little more on the “murder” side of things than he had expected. Within minutes of his arrival, pictures have been taken, cocaine has been consumed, and one corpse has already been put in a freezer. He’s tied up, gagged and locked in a warehouse, surrounded by unstable art students who are all trying to find the most artistically relevant way to end his life; of course, this is all an attempt to snag some grant money. Chris is our witness, and our surrogate, into the abyss where he must fight for his life and maybe, on the way, learn to stand up to his own cat. It’s an outlandish narrative that confidently descends into an absurd, comical kind of hellscape.

Most of this is all confined to a single location with a practically mute protagonist. The film is pretty dependent on the wonderful dialogue written by Saulnier. The approach is naturalistic (though, these people do seem to be fixated on the word “dildo”) and each character has an internal life and desires, which make their decisions feel like they are coming from a realistic place. Plus, it is fair to mention that these people are on a fair amount of drugs. Even each of their physical needs are accounted for; consider when, during an escape attempt, Chris has to stop to use the restroom after being tied up all night. There’s humanity in their actions. It’s deceptively simple and absolutely bonkers in a way that Saulnier’s later work isn't. Not to say Blue Ruin and Green Room are tame, by any means, they are just more controlled.

Now, with a limited budget, some mess is to be expected. It tends to drag every now and then, and it spends a bit too much time detached from the main character, sapping it of some much needed urgency. However, the true joy of this film comes in its messiness. It thrives as a personal document of a group of people who love making genre films more than anything else. They love it so much that they threw all of their own savings into making it, and when Murder Party failed to get attention they tried it all over again with Blue Ruin. With non-stop dialogue, long hand-held takes and gruesome makeup effects, this could have been a disaster. Instead, Saulnier gave us a love letter to horror cinema that ends with the kind of bloodbath any horror fan would be grateful for.