Dirtylogy
It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
Erica Derrick
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin
The movie really just wants to entertain people.
Dr. Kenneth Noisewater
The opening scene, as is mentioned in many reviews, is not the "hook" they intended, and you might click your Roku back to Menu, but give it a chance and this film will break your heart. It's so real and true, I've met all these people, I've even been some of them. The directing is subtle and jumps around like a mosaic, but I got it. And the awkwardness is well done. This is a terrible comparison, but think of the silent, awkward moments in The Office. Instead of being funny, these situations are so cruel but so real and familiar that you believe them. We've all encountered these things at some point, but here, no one steps in for the downtrodden protagonist. She's left out in the cold over and over again. It's one of those films you stay with until the end of the credits.
callmequirky
I enjoyed the movie. The filmography, with long close-ups of faces and eyes, fantasies, and flashbacks or forwards depicted the emotions someone in a similar situation might feel. Watching the film I had, "Oh honey! No! Don't do that!" moments, or, "Oh crap that's awful, I hate it when that happens," and "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps," and "Oh, now that's just degrading, but you probably needed to live through it to get past it," moments. People everywhere have acted out after disappointments and this is a great depiction of someone searching for something both during, and after, an epic loss. The soundtrack was great. I don't know what it cost, but it made me *feel* as much as Titanic ever could, and I assume on a fraction of the budget.
aparkspdx
Andrew Schenker of Slant Magazine says it best, and finally the plain truth. "In In his latest film, Rid of Me, writer/director/editor/producer James Westby trades in a lot of false assumptions: that by constantly zooming into a character's eyes, he can somehow get at essential truths about their nature; that showing the same object from three different angles in quick succession gives us a more complete picture of a given situation; and that almost everyone in the world (or at least everyone in small-town Oregon) is either a racist, narrow-minded, overgrown frat boy/sorority girl/rules-beholden or booze-soaked, vomit-prone goth. At once hopelessly amateurish and given to desperate assertions of "virtuosity," Westby's film seems as lost as its perpetually confused and gratingly childlike protagonist. Moving from Irvine, California to her husband's Pacific Northwest hometown, Meris Canfield (Katie O'Grady) finds life in her new community to be instantly and wholly oppressive. Although she tries to be a dutiful wife, her husband's friends, with whom she's constantly forced to socialize, are unbearably obnoxious; the men are given to boorish antics, the women to crude condescension. When her hubby ditches her for an old flame, Meris takes a job at a local candy store where she befriends goth-chick coworker Trudy (Orianna Herrman). Before long, she's attending punk shows (goth/punk, what's the difference?), guzzling whiskey straight out the bottle, and getting screwed by sleazy men. Will our heroine ever right the ship and find balance in her life? Of course she will, and apparently all it takes is the love of a good man, in this case a geeky record-shop clerk, a narrative device that becomes necessary because Meris is so childlike and barely there that she scarcely seems capable of any independent action. (Or when she does, it feels like the whim of the director rather than anything that arises organically from her amorphous character.) With both the straights and the Goths reduced to gross caricature, there's little for Meris to choose between. And yet, for all the ridicule heaped on the latter group, it's the black-clad crew that allows our girl to find herself, the excesses of their behavior (along with all the film's other problems) papered over and resolved in one neat tying-it-all-up montage. If there's one thing Westby loves to do it's to cut quickly and often (whether between past and present, between different views of a various object, or between ever closer glimpses of a character's face), so it's no surprise that he calls on his signature montage technique to bring together the messy, incoherent strands of his movie, though when he does, it's with no more purpose than any of his previous bouts of brain-exploding Final Cut Pro manipulations.
indiepixie
Rid of Me is an experience. Be prepared to cringe, laugh and maybe cry, because Katie O'Grady makes this journey devastatingly real. As Meris, she conjures the realization of our worst fears and insecurities and demonstrates the graceless and mortifying path back to redemption. There's no romanticizing the painful detours a life can take in this film and there's really nothing tidy and formulaic about it. Definitely something different. And me, I love this stuff. As gut-wrenching as it was to watch at times, it was also full of quirky characters and well-timed comic relief. Good stuff!
