Cold in July

(2014) ★★★★

Sky Movies Premiere: PREMIERE Friday 15 May, 11.30am and 10.15pm

Meek family man Michael C. Hall is mortifed after shooting dead a masked intruder in his east Texas home. The boy wasn’t pointing a gun at Hall. It was a flashlight. “He was a wanted felon,” says the small-town sheriff Nick Damici, shrugging it off. “Sometimes the good guy wins.” But Hall finds little reassurance in Damici’s words. Especially since the dead boy’s father has just been paroled from Huntsville. He’s Sam Shepard, and he’ll come bearing grudges. Following his recent sympathetic turns in August: Osage County and Out of the Furnace, the veteran actor-playwright Shepard shows he’s still got the right stuff, going gruffly from laconic to speechless when the story – set in 1989 – delves ever deeper into the kind of bleak corners inhabited by the likes of Jim Thompson, author of The Killer Inside Me. The man doing most of the talking here is Don Johnson’s Jim Bob, an ebullient pig farmer cum private eye for hire. The kind who wears a stetson and drives a cherry red Cadillac convertible. Against the odds, these three mismatched musketeers discover they have a common enemy. The Dixieland mafia. Not just bad, downright evil. Sheriff Damici can’t be trusted either. This is the fourth collaboration between actor-writer Damici and writer-director Jim Mickle. Their first two features, Mulberry Street and Stake Land, offered fresh perspectives on hackneyed zombie and vampire horror themes, something they couldn’t possibly achieve with their third: We Are What We Are was a remake of the cult Mexican cannibal picture. Cold in July, though, is a solid jolt of hardboiled red-white-and-blues that’s as unglued as the Scandi-noirs Jackpot and Headhunters. Uninterested in Killer Joe’s vaguely camp kind of histrionics, it burns like Out of the Furnace on a more satisfying emotional level while keeping you off balance.

Certificate: 15
Duration: 106min 

IMDB – Cold in July

TMDB – Cold in July

Rotten Tomatoes – Cold in July