Blow The Man Down - Cheap Thoughts

Well this was an unexpected recurrence, two films in a row that feature the death of a small-town prostitute as a plot point. Though unlike the last film where it was the driving point, it is merely a subplot in this one. Blow The Man Down unveils the dark underbelly of a corrupted small town and how the setting in itself becomes a witness. The common characteristics of charming villages and small towns is this idea of community, everyone knows everyone and almost no change goes unnoticed, this film exploits that concept and turns it into incriminating evidence. Early on in the film our two protagonists Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) and Priscilla (Sophie Lowe) have to cover up a manslaughter and it leads them down a rabbit hole of the town’s dark secrets that they are now involved in as despite their efforts to cover up their evidence, as stated earlier, no change goes unnoticed.

The more information and history of this town is explored the film plays more into this identity of the quaint ordinary town. They’re often placed build on legacy, they have old families that have spent generations there as well as their own customs. Yet again this is a feature transformed into something dark, as the girls learn more about the distressing history of their own family and even some of the most charming residents that they’ve known their whole lives have acted in immoral ways. As if to say their actions are not their own, but merely partaking in tradition, their actions are controlled by their family and their environment and they cannot escape from it. There’s an air of unconscious corruption in the town, the police chief doesn’t even assume hostile intent and takes many bad people’s word as fact simply due to knowing them for so long he has no objective view, or perhaps he is fully aware of his friends misdeeds and simply chooses to do nothing.

There’s definitely a voyeuristic nature to the townspeople. Early on we see one of the citizens witness an assault and they simply choose to view it from their window like a nosey neighbour. Knowledge of crime and depravity is not so much a motivation to enforce justice, but to consume as gossip and at most blackmail. There’s a moral greyness to the citizens but to leave it at that feels like an understatement, as if this has been the way of the land for so long the idea of morality faded away a long time ago, nothing they do is good or evil, it’s just the status quo. There’s no possibility of change if no one can acknowledge that their system is broken, and that might be the bleakest message of the film.

-Danny