I Blame Society: Mockumentary Better as Film Critique than As a Black Comedy

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-

In Gillian Wallace Horvath’s first feature I Blame Society, the filmmaker plays herself. Or at least, someone with her name: a desperately eager Los Angeles filmmaker trying to get her first feature made.

Among her handicaps, we learn from the opening scene, Gillian has problems with social boundaries. She tells her friend Chase (the film’s co-writer Chase Williamson) that she really hates his girlfriend and would like to make a mockumentary in which she kills her. Three years later, they’re still not talking, and Gillian’s career is going nowhere.

Sure, she has made a couple of “fucked up” shorts (the real-life Gillian has produced and directed several dozen, including documentary studies of film history). When her big first feature project “about Israel” is considered too political, her agent dumps her. That brings her back to murder.

Because someone once said she would make a good murderer — and she never forgets a compliment — she decides she should make a mock documentary about her evolution as a serial killer. Her boyfriend, Keith (Keith Paulson), her mother and grandmother, think the idea is terrible. But in the film’s sharpest scenes, a meeting with a pair of bro-producers (Lucas Kavner and Morgan Krantz) convinces her to make a pitch.

They pair spin out a kind of topical line of contempo blather that makes you shudder: They want to make films with “strong female leads,” and ‘cause they’re woke, they support “breast-feeding in public” and “intersexuality” or maybe “intersectionality.” They want to make provocative films where, you know, the audience thinks people are “white, but they’re not.” And of course, they urge Gillian to be “authentic” and “go big.”

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Carrying a variety of borrowed video cams and using jerry-rigged equipment, Gillian starts working on her making-of-a murderer mockumentary. She starts small, with shoplifting and breaking and entering. Soon, she graduates to drugging and killing people, including several men, including a young homeless man who she picks up, has sex with, and then dispatches of.

“I know. I’m really jeopardizing my likeability,” she laments to the ever-present camera.

The murder episodes are way too awkwardly amateurish to create much of a thrill. I Blame Society barely scrapes by as midnight movie camp; it’s much better as a form of wryly witty performance art/film criticism.

As Gillian follows her producers’ advice, even the rhetoric around “strong female leads” turns out to be a gateway to sexualized violence, under cover of either jokey irony or self-righteousness. As the New York Times critic Jeanette Catsoulis observed of Promising Young Woman — which could be I Blame Society’s grimmer cousin — it “turns sociopathy into a style and trauma into a joke.”

I Blame Society. Directed by Gillian Wallace Horvat. Written by Gillian Wallace Horvat and Chase Williamson. Starring Gillian Wallace Horvat, Keith Poulson, Chase Williamson, Lucas Kavner, Morgan Krantz, Alexia Rasmussen, Olivia Kuan and Jennifer Kim. Available on Apple TV beginning February 12.