Vengeance

The story of a podcast producer who goes from New York to Texas. Ben is a self-important writer living in New York. One night his phone rings: a woman he knew has died and her family thinks he was her boyfriend. They invite him to the funeral. He goes, and finds an idea there. The family believes she was murdered; the police speak of an overdose. Ben decides to turn it into a podcast series. That is the film's target: turning a person's death into content. Ben arrives with fixed opinions about the countryside and tries to fit everyone he talks to into his own narrative. As the story goes on two things happen. Ben starts genuinely getting to know the family, and the case turns out to be more complicated than it looked. The register moves between comedy and thriller; the film works both as media criticism and as a murder investigation. B. J. Novak wrote, directed and starred; it is his first feature. Boyd Holbrook, Issa Rae and Ashton Kutcher are in the cast. An interesting experiment for anyone who likes satire and criticism of the media. For a viewer who wants a clear genre, the narrative stays undecided between two registers and its ending caused argument.