River's Edge

A teenager kills his girlfriend and leaves the body by the river. Then he takes his friends to see it. They look, they talk, they smoke, and nobody calls the police. The film is not interested in the murder. It is interested in the absence of reaction: for more than eighty minutes it refuses to explain why a group of teenagers show no feeling, and that is exactly where the discomfort comes from. The form is cold. The camera does not judge, the music does not steer, and the loudest character is an adult who deals drugs and lives with a blow-up doll. Neal Jimenez wrote the screenplay, drawing partly on a real case: the 1981 murder of Marcy Renee Conrad in Milpitas, California. The killer, Anthony Jacques Broussard, boasted about the crime, showed the body to at least thirteen people, and the case went unreported for two days. Tim Hunter directed. Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye star, with Dennis Hopper in support. Who it is for: viewers who like dark eighties youth films and morally uncomfortable cinema. Who it is not for: anyone in search of sympathetic characters. Most of these teenagers are repellent, and the film does not soften them.