Cold in July is a visceral crime thriller with a plot that twists and turns enough to leave your stomach in knots.
When shy and conscientious picture framer Richard Dane (Michael C Hall) kills an unarmed home intruder, the police inform him that the intruder's father, Ben Russell (Sam Shepherd), has recently been released from jail. Hunting for some patriarchal vengeance Ben starts to stalk Richard and his family, however when Richard begins to suspect the police aren't telling him the whole story he discovers he's caught up in a much more complex web of witness protection, deep south Mafia and brutal snuff-porn.
The dank, sweaty, shape-shifting plot from a novel by bombastic crime writer Joe R Lansdale (Bubba Ho-Tep) continually evolves, so what starts out as a Cape Fear-style stalker tale, becomes a story of police corruption and organised crime, and then changes again to become about fatherhood and parental responsibility. But rather than jar, the ambitious tonal shifts keep the audience on their toes, surprising either with a plot revelation, a new character or a wry flash of humour. At the mid-point, when Don Johnson's swaggering, self-parodying private detective Jim Bob Luke arrives in his candy apple-red Cadillac, it injects the picture with some dark comedy relief.
This is the fourth collaboration between director Jim Mickle and co-writer Frank Damici, and it's a confident, genre bending effort. The over-the-top third act full of cartoonish blood and gore is grounded by the character study premise of a mild-mannered man trying to clear his conscious. Richard, whose immediately out of his depth in the murky quagmire of Southern neo-noir, simply wants to find out who he murdered in the opening scene. But you quickly get the feeling the character was always out of his depth, long before the film's timeline, surrounded by the macho men of Texas.
"I didn't think you had it in you." Older, local guys keep telling our have-a-go hero while slapping him on the back. By the end, after some fierce tension and gruesome ultra-violence, his mullet and moustache remain the same, but Richard has definitely grown a pair.
Stark lighting and a synth-laden John Carpenter-esque soundtrack evokes the '80s setting and B-movie overtones, and has blood-soaked shades of Red Rock West and Blood Simple. But narratively it isn't as tight and plot threads introduced in the taut first half are left dangling loose in favour of the story switching focus. A twitchy Michael C Hall, and the character development of Richard Dane, holds it all together, and although this may not be the role to launch Dexter into the Hollywood A-list, it sure shows the man's got some respectable acting chops.
Cold in July's a gripping crime drama full of good old-fashioned thrills that are artistically crafted by a cinematic self-assurance that will leave you in chills.
