What to Watch After Blue Ruin: More Quiet, Bloody Revenge

The thing that gets you about Blue Ruin isn’t the violence. It’s how bad the guy is at it. Jeremy Saulnier’s 2013 film is a revenge story where the avenger is an amateur, the gun goes off wrong, and every dead body creates two new problems. No cool one-liners, no clean kills, just a soft-spoken drifter in over his head, sweating through the worst week of his life. It’s revenge stripped of fantasy.

If that specific flavor of dread stuck with you — patient, grounded, more nauseous than thrilling — here’s where to go next. Seven films that understand violence has weight, and one you probably haven’t heard of.

Green Room (2015)

The obvious next step, since it’s Saulnier again, but earn it anyway. A broke punk band gets trapped in a backwoods venue after witnessing something they shouldn’t have, and the neo-Nazis who run the place would rather they never leave. It’s tighter and nastier than Blue Ruin, almost unbearably tense, and it shares that same refusal to make brutality look elegant. People die stupidly and suddenly. Patrick Stewart plays the calm, reasonable monster in charge, and he’s terrifying precisely because he’s never in a hurry.

Rebel Ridge (2024)

Saulnier’s most recent, and a bit of a swerve — this one’s a slow-burn about civil asset forfeiture and small-town police corruption that gradually tightens into a thriller. Aaron Pierre is magnetic as a man trying very hard not to become violent, which makes the pressure almost worse. It trades the grime of his earlier work for something more controlled, but the DNA is the same: institutions grinding down an ordinary person until something has to give.

Cold in July (2014)

Jim Mickle’s adaptation of the Joe R. Lansdale novel starts as one movie — a homeowner shoots an intruder, then the dead man’s father comes looking — and keeps mutating into something stranger and pulpier. Set in 1980s East Texas, drenched in synth and neon dread, it’s about fathers, guilt, and the ugliness people rationalize. Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard, and a gloriously unhinged Don Johnson anchor it. Few revenge films are this willing to let the plot rot in unexpected directions.

Hell or High Water (2016)

Not horror, barely even a thriller in the conventional sense, but it belongs here. Two brothers rob banks across a sun-bleached, dying West Texas while a near-retirement ranger tracks them. Taylor Sheridan’s script makes you understand everyone, and the violence, when it lands, feels like a wound. It’s about economic desperation and the slow bleed of a place the modern world forgot. The quiet is doing the heavy lifting, same as Blue Ruin.

Wind River (2017)

Sheridan again, directing this time. A wildlife tracker and a rookie FBI agent investigate a death on a snowbound Wyoming reservation. It’s cold in every sense — the landscape is a character, indifferent and lethal — and the eventual confrontation is short, clumsy, and devastating rather than triumphant. Like the best of these, it treats revenge as grief with nowhere to go.

Blood Simple (1984)

The Coen Brothers’ debut, and the granddaddy of this whole lineage. A jealous bar owner hires a sleazy PI to kill his wife and her lover, and absolutely nobody understands what anyone else is doing. It’s a masterclass in misunderstanding as horror — people acting on wrong information, digging holes both literal and moral. The Texas heat, the incompetence, the sheer sweaty panic of covering up a crime you botched: it’s all here, decades before Blue Ruin made it fashionable again.

Blood Star (2024)

Here’s the one you can’t have heard much about, because almost nobody has. Blood Star is a 2024 indie thriller from first-time feature director Lawrence Jacomelli, shot out in the Mojave, and it plays like a lost 70s road picture filtered through modern slow-burn restraint. A woman on a desert highway, an escalating situation she can’t outrun, and that specific Blue Ruin quality where every choice makes things marginally worse. It’s a survival film, a psychological pressure-cooker, and a desert-noir all at once, and it never once reaches for a cheap scare.

What surprised me is how good it looks. The film was made lean — a small crew, ten shooting days in brutal conditions, well under a studio budget — and you’d never guess it from the frame. There’s real craft in the cinematography and a lead performance that carries the dread. It premiered on the festival circuit before finding its way to streaming, which is where most people are quietly stumbling onto it now. If you like your revenge and survival stories grounded, tense, and a little bleak, it slots right in beside everything above.

It reminded me of Duel as much as anything modern — that same sense of an ordinary person and an indifferent landscape closing in. Genuinely the kind of movie you finish and want to tell one other person about.

Blood Star is streaming now on Apple TV and Amazon. You can read more about the film and find where to watch it at bloodstarmovie.com — the watch page has the current links.