I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore

I’m sometimes amazed that anyone is still making quirky little movies like this. Ruth, played by Melanie Lynskey, comes home to find that she has been burgled. They took her laptop, and her grandmother’s silverware. The cops make it clear that they aren’t going to do much about such a penny-ante crime, and she is so incensed that she starts her own hunt. This leads her to Tony (Elijah Wood), a rather odd fellow, who joins her. Things escalate by degrees until, almost without knowing it, we are in a very violent situation. It’s very well done. I quickly grew to hate some of the people she encounters, and it was gratifying to see them meet their fates.

Lynskey’s first role was in Heavenly Creatures, a seriously strange based-on-fact story of two girls who murder the mother of one of them. She is a New Zealander, like the director, Peter Jackson. This was years before he became a Big Name with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was also the debut of Kate Winslet. Lynskey didn’t get the seven Oscar nominations and one win that Winslet did, but at least she seems to have worked steadily. Elijah Wood, once he stopped being Frodo, seems to be attracted to odd movies like this. We’ve seen him in several.