There is no single bad guy in Assassination Nation, a wild new cult film from director Sam Levinson. Like Arthur Miller’s classic witch-hunt satire The Crucible (from which it takes heavy inspiration), if there is a baddie, it’s righteousness. “I became wary of this idea of righteousness,” says Levinson, “ and how that is the central villain of The Crucible and I think the villain in this film in many ways. The fact that people are able to operate with absolute certainty that they are right and therefore their actions are just — that’s a horror film to me.”
When Levinson wrote the screenplay some two years ago, he had no idea the significance that a biting feminist satire-horror would take on in Trump-era America — bringing the Salem witch trials into the social media age and wreaking havoc with touchscreens instead of flaming torches. “It wasn’t a reaction to anything in particular,” says Levinson, reflecting on the events of the last year, “It was in anticipation of where things were headed culturally and socially and as a country.” Starring Odessa Young and Suki Waterhouse, the film sees a group of promiscuous high schoolers blackmailed by a mystery hacker, who then releases the whole town’s online indiscretions — leading to Purge-like mayhem.
My hope is that people walk out of the theatre feeling emotionally destroyed.
“It’s impossible for young people to navigate their sexuality through the internet; everything is ultimately crystalised and at any point it can be used as ammunition against you,” says Levinson. “It’s something that is not often dealt with in storytelling — we have a generation of young people who aren’t allowed to make mistakes in any way.” The film does serve as a vamped up interpretation of America with the brakes off — yet there is a sweeter tale of sisterhood at its core, of sticking together no matter how bad things get (and they get really bad). “These are four girls who have known each other for their entire lives, who love each other and would go to war for one another,” says Levinson. “That’s a really tough thing to fake - when we were casting the girls it wasn’t really about finding the individual but how they worked as a family and the camaraderie that they had.”
Levinson intends to shock — the film starts with a witty ‘Trigger Warning’, promising violence, torture and fragile male egos — but he hopes Assassination Nation can also be a battle cry in trying times. “My hope is that people walk out of the theatre feeling emotionally destroyed, but also with a sense of hope about how we can move things forward and how we can change the way in which we communicate. Because the world would be a better place for it.”
Assassination Nation is in cinemas now. Read the Empire review here.