American Insurrection (2021) is more interesting than the marketing would have you believe. Ignore the poster.
There’s been something in the air, probably since before Trump was elected in the United States, and to a lesser extent Johnson in the United Kingdom, that’s emboldened a certain section of disillusioned citizens. This film, like the much more bombastic Civil War (2024), imagines what might happen if the movement that inspired January 6th riots had been more successful.
Two couples are hiding in a remote farm, waiting to be contacted by allies ready to smuggle them across the border into Canada. Trapped in this purgatory, obsessively monitoring a radio for instructions from their Canadian connection, they wait to be discovered by the local chapter of the Volunteers, the armed militia now in control of the country. To complicate this already dangerous situation they have the owner of farm, a Volunteer, chained up in the barn.
Then, as if things weren’t already complicated enough, one of the group rescues a young gay refugee fleeing north, killing two Volunteers in the process. As the Volunteer noose begins to tighten, the complicated history of each couples relationship begins to unravel with devastating consequences.
It’s a film that makes things personal, concentrating on the domestic situation, and is clever enough to avoid clumsy exposition, by letting story reveal plot.
Darrin // Nightingale 