It’s the stuff great crime novels are made of. The suspicious death of a young construction worker (Caleb Landry Jones); his grieving, heartbroken mother (Christina Hendricks); a body in a truck; a bartender who sees all (Peter Gerety); and a town full of oddball characters not nearly as dumb as they look.
And then there’s Philip Seymour Hoffman. The tragedy of the actor’s death is felt throughout the feature debut from John Slattery – aka Mad Men’s sleazy Roger Sterling. It is a blackly funny account of one man living through a series of increasingly unfortunate events. Half-hearted attempts by Mickey (Hoffman) to solve the murder of his step-son and to arrange the victim’s funeral cut though the film’s genre façade, revealing the cumulative impact of small losses. That is, losing your money to gambling, losing your livelihood to power cuts, losing your wife to another man, losing your sense of purpose. Though yellow street lights may cast perfectly angular thriller shadows on dodgy back-alleys, life doesn’t have a neat pigeonhole. People trip, dead bodies fall over and tragedy is constantly undercut by moments of the darkest comedy.