Movies Movie Reviews Assassination Nation is a wild, pitch-black satire: EW review By Leah Greenblatt Leah Greenblatt Leah Greenblatt is the former critic at large for movies, books, music, and theater at Entertainment Weekly. She left EW in 2023. EW's editorial guidelines Published on September 21, 2018 03:53PM EDT Smash-cut trigger warnings, a shotgun blast, the glassy ping of an iPhone: Assassination Nation telegraphs its M.O. before the opening credits roll. Sam Levinson’s pitch-black comedy is a bloody, wildly stylized study in 21st-century satire: Heathers without the hairbows, Natural Born Killers in suburban-Millennial drag. (Spring Breakers and I Spit on Your Grave also come to mind.) In a town called — not portentously at all — Salem, 18-year-old Lily (Odessa Young) cruises the hallways of her high school with best friends Bex (Hari Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), and Em (Abra). They’re the obvious cool girls of a thousand teen movies, but Levinson doesn’t let you forget for a minute that he knows it: “I love this song!” Bex exclaims as they roll through the quad. Which song? “This one,” she snaps her fingers, and the music cues up — conjuring the meta magic of filmmaking from thin air. Hari Nef on leading the unburnable witches of Assassination Nation into the patriarchal abyss Neon Bex, by the way, is also trans; Em is black. It’s to the director’s and the actresses’ credit that none of this feels like ticked boxes on a diversity wish list. Anyway it’s blond, pretty, cis-gendered Lily who becomes the main target when a data leak exposes the town’s cross-dressing mayor, the earnest school principal, and dozens of other private citizens to ridicule, professional disgrace, and worse. Nation’s take on the corrosive reach of social media — with all the sex-shaming, tribalism, and amplified rage it only seems to viralize — is not exactly fresh. And for some, the movie’s blithe candy-apple feminism and cartoonish violence will no doubt come off as misguided as the targets they supposedly condemn. But there’s a kinetic energy in Levinson’s telling, and real catharsis in a riotous final sequence that feels all the more triumphant for the unlikeliness of such a bloody, happy ending. B+