“BLOW THE MAN DOWN”: Quaint rot

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Published March 19, 2020, by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

“BLOW THE MAN DOWN” My rating: B- (Available March 20 on Amazon Prime)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Easter Cove, Maine, is just as picturesque as the name implies.

Lots of boats, weather-worn houses, gray winter skies, residents bred of  tough New England stock…hell, the commercial fishermen even punctuate their daily grind by singing sea chanties directly to the camera.

But beneath the quaint facade things are rotten. At least according to Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy’s noir-ish “Blow the Man Down.”

Our protagonists are sisters Pris and Mary Beth Connolly (Sophie Lowe, Morgan Saylor), who as the film begins are burying their mother and discovering that Mom’s retail seafood shop is on life support and the mortgage on the house is way past due.

Their current economic crisis only exacerbates the differences between the two young women. Priss is the “good” sister who runs the shop and toes the line. Mary Beth is a bit of a wildcat, resentful that she had to suspend college to care for her dying mother and desperate to leave Easter Cove behind.

Which is why the night after the funeral Mary Beth goes bar hopping (actually, there’s only one bar in town), picks up a scuzzy and vaguely threatening fisherman (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and ends up defending herself with an old harpoon.  (Murder by harpoon…you don’t get more New England than that.)

The panicked sisters opt not to talk to the cops. Instead they stuff the body in a big styrofoam ice chest (some dismemberment required…a fish filleting knife comes in handy), weigh it with an old anchor and toss it off a cliff into the roaring sea.

Oh, yeah…in the dead man’s shack they discover a plastic bag with a small fortune in cash.

Sophie Lowe, Morgan Saylor

In the sense that it follows the girls’ efforts to cover up their crime, keep the money,  avoid arrest and elude the dead guy’s criminal cohorts, Cole and Krudy’s screenplay embraces the basic noir elements.

But “Blow the Man Down” is less interested in plot than in establishing a haunting atmosphere and dissecting the complicated pecking order of Easter Cove.

For starters there’s Mom’s best friends (played by veterans June Squibb, Marceline Hugot and Annette O’Toole). These three are a bit like fairy godmothers to the two girls, dispensing advice, observing them from afar and stepping in when they feel Priss and Mary Beth are walking on thin ice.

Margo Martindale

The three are particularly incensed by the presence of Enid (the great Margo Martindale), whose bed-and-breakfast operation is actually a bordelllo.  Enid was for many years the best friend of the girls’ mother; now the three biddies fear she will turn her corrupting influence on these innocents.

Things get especially gnarly when the sisters learn that Mom was instrumental in founding the whorehouse decades earlier.

Anyway, there’s plenty of stuff kicking around here. The body of one of Enid’s prositutes is found floating in the sea with a bullet hole in her chest; the callow young police officer (Will Brittain)  investigating the case gets a crush on Priss that for a while clouds his judgment; Enid recovers the knife used to carve up Mary Beth’s victim and threatens to use it in a blackmail scheme.

“Blow the Man Down” is something of a tangential enterprise; it is neither overtly dramatic or comic, but drifts back and forth like seaweed pushed by ocean currents. As a result the film is short on big moments but strong on ambience. And the remarkably deep cast (Martindale is particularly effective) keep us hanging on.

| Robert W. Butler