‘Assassination Nation’ Was a Pitch-Dark Flop in Theaters, But Streaming Is Where It Deserves to Be Anyway

In the annals of all-time Sundance Film Festival over-spends, there are some film titles we’ll all remember, even if it’s for how unmemorable they are. Hamlet 2 sold for $10 million in 2008; Happy, Texas was the original Sundance bomb with a similar $10 million price tag in 1999. The Birth of a Nation sold for over $17 to Fox Searchlight and kicked off like it was an Oscar frontrunner but crumbled when it came down to sea level (and director/star Nate Parker’s controversial past).

At 2018’s Sundance, up-and-coming indie label Neon purchased the in-your-face teen freakout Assassination Nation for a cool $10 million, only to see the film open at #15 (on more than a thousand screens) and top out at $2 million domestic. What’s strange is that even at Sundance, reception for director Sam Levinson’s film was mixed, with a fair share of critics dubbing it an “immature screed” and even its supporters calling it messy.

Still, with Assassination Nation now available to rent or buy on VOD, maybe the film has reached its ideal level. After all, it’s strongly a film of its time; if you power through the battering stylistics and assaultive attitudes, the film is at its heart about the precarious balance we’ve all placed ourselves, trusting so much of our lives to an entity (the internet) that doesn’t give a damn about privacy. If you’ve long wondered the hell on Earth that would descend if all of a sudden everybody’s DMs were suddenly made public, this should be a movie that speaks to you.

The film focuses on a quartet of 18-year-old girls — played by Suki Waterhouse, Hari Neff, Abra, and Odessa Young — who end up at the center of a hurricane of toxic masculinity which takes the form of an old-school witch hunt (we’re set in Salem, MA, see?) after a hack ends up revealing the private information of everybody in town. The anarchy of this sudden breach of any and all secrets triggers everything from rape culture to armed violence. With the bad behavior of particularly the men in town placed on display, those very men don masks and begin to extract vengeance. It’s not quite The Purge in terms of attempting to string up current events into a topical indictment, but if you’re seeing strong parallels to the way that powerful men have been exposed for their decades of bad behavior, it’s probably no accident.

Of course this movie should exist on streaming. This movie should live on Instagram. It should live in the comment section of a YouTube video. It should fight Donald Trump’s Twitter account every evening at sundown. Assassination was a theatrical bomb, but it’s not hard to imagine the generations who know just how insane a mass privacy leak would be could find this movie and make it their own, excess and all. Fairly warned.

Where to stream Assassination Nation