BLUE Ruin is one of those indie American films that should always be the preserve of City Screen.

You won't find this 90-minute slacker thriller at York's other cinemas, but you will find it on the cover of the latest Picturehouse York brochure, accompanied by its tagline Revenge Comes Home, and indeed revenge comes home movie, albeit one with a one million dollar budget.

Giving writer-director Jeremy Saulnier's second feature such prominence indicates City Screen's high expectations for a compact, undemonstrative film on which the former commercials and corporate video man staked his family's money.

It is a parochial movie, a film festival movie, a slow grower, that is all the more tangible for its lack of stardust, its next-door-neighbourly ordinariness. Mind you, we're talking red-neck next-door neighbour, the one who would vote for anyone called Bush, even if he were foliage.

It is not a film about heroes or anti-heroes, but about a self-pitying man acting on the spur of the moment, already changed by horrendous circumstance after his parents are murdered. That man is homeless drifter Dwight (mournful Macon Blair), who lives on his wits and out of his rusted Pontiac by the beach.

Told by the police that the convicted Will Cleland (David W Thompson) is to be released, Dwight heads home to West Virginia to wreak bloody if amateurish revenge, his actions methodical and numb, but with no forethought of what might happen when he encounters Will's hillbilly clan.

Where do you go next when you have completed your task by administering your version of justice and yet the world won't stop, asks Saulnier. He does so with frank camerawork, grimy realism and shards of jagged, dark humour that gleefully if bleakly put America's dumb-ass underbelly to the sword.

Saulnier nods to road movie and thriller clichés, but he is closest in spirit to the Coen Brothers in their early pomp. Not as good, nor as original, but Blue Ruin is grisly and gripping, its revenge served bitter and blue-cold.

Jameson Irish Whiskey is sponsoring City Screen’s opening weekend of Blue Ruin in York, so customers seeing the film from tomorrow (MAY 2) through to Bank Holiday Monday will all be offered a free Jameson & Ginger.  This is restricted to customers over the age of 18  and while stocks last.