Photo: Patti Perret/Netflix
Spoilers follow for Rebel Ridge, which premiered on Netflix on September 6.
The finale of Jeremy Saulnier’s action-meets-legal-thriller Rebel Ridge moves on the rhythm of protagonist Terry Richmond’s (Aaron Pierre) choices — all of which go against what his enemies expect him to do. The scene goes against what viewers expect the filmmaker to do, too.
Terry refuses to meet the Shelby Springs police at Rebel Ridge, the implied Confederate stronghold where the villainous Officer Lann (Emory Cohen) wants to do a swap for incriminating evidence. He attacks the police station that stores officers’ stolen loot, and threatens the “discretionary funds” they care about more than their duty to citizens. And when Chief Burnne (Don Johnson) orders his police to “shoot that motherfucker,” he anticipates Terry to respond in kind. Maybe because he’s a Black man, maybe because he was a Marine, maybe because they’ve pushed him to the limit by allowing his cousin to be killed, attempting to frame him, and injecting his friend Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) twice with heroin. But Terry’s not going to give in to what they want, or bend to the will of a larger abusive force. Because of that, he’s a Saulnier protagonist through and through.
I’ll admit this: When I first saw Rebel Ridge, I wanted a different ending after seeing the extent of Shelby Springs’s corruption — the police’s abuse of civil asset forfeiture and their sneering dismissal of Terry’s concern for his cousin Mike (C.J. LeBlanc); government employees like clerks and judges essentially shrugging at the police running roughshod over people’s Constitutional rights as long as they get “Christmas lights in December, fireworks on the Fourth of July, and a nice little old tax cut on top.” I wanted Terry’s vow to “haunt” the police to be as literal as possible; hell yeah, let’s see that Marine Corps Martial Arts Program training! So when the film’s concluding half-hour is Terry using guerrilla tactics to confuse and disengage rather than aggravate and escalate, I felt somewhat unfulfilled.
But a couple rewatches later, what becomes clear about Rebel Ridge is how neatly Terry Richmond actually fits into an existing pattern of Saulnier protagonists who only act destructively when pushed to the absolute brink. Blue Ruin (2013), Green Room (2015), and Hold the Dark (2018) all stack up high body counts: Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) attacks the Cleland family to avenge his parents’ murder; the punk-rock band the Ain’t Rights fight through neo-Nazis to escape the compound where they’re being systematically killed; Alaskan natives Vernon Slone (Alexander Skarsgård) and Cheeon (Julian Black Antelope) murder cops to reclaim the body of Vernon’s son and to punish the local police force for not investigating the epidemic of missing indigenous children. Each of these films gives into blood splatter and gore. Upon second look, though, they also center protagonists who do everything they can to fight against that calamitous slide — and whose actions are precursors to Terry’s policy of de-escalation.
In Blue Ruin, Dwight offers the Clelands an end to their interfamilial dispute if they leave his sister out of it, and only when they’re enthusiastic about killing her, too, does he go through with his ambush on them. In Green Room, the Ain’t Rights insist over and over that their captors call the police, who they assume will come to their aid; when it becomes clear that the neo-Nazis have already tricked the local cops into leaving, the band members decide to fight back. And in Hold the Dark, Cheeon’s attack on cops with armor-piercing bullets is methodical and gruesome, but he’d already become desperate before this point. “When we’re killed the past is killed, and the past is already dead, so no big deal. But when kids are killed, that’s different. When kids are killed the future dies. And there’s no life without a future,” he offers as justification for his actions.
Like Dwight, Terry offers an end to the standoff in the film’s concluding showdown. Like the Ain’t Rights, he appeals to the idea of good cops on the Shelby Springs force who might object to Burnne and Lann attacking Officer Marston (David Denman), who is revealed to be a whistleblower against the civil asset forfeiture conspiracy. And, while Terry might not have a death wish like Cheeon, he tells the police to their face how much they’ve failed to protect and serve. When Terry wears Mike’s hospital bracelet around his wrist during this final sequence, it’s key to the confrontation — a memento mori made into an object of accusation against the police for their misconduct.
Saulnier understands that some viewers might have a hard time with the film’s ending. The local Shelby Springs police, knowing that state police are on their way and could take over their department in the case of malfeasance, turn on Chief Burnne and escort Terry and the injured Marston and Summer to a local hospital. (“For some people, that’s a huge leap,” he admitted when we spoke.) But the director insists any ending in which Terry killed police officers would also have to end in the character’s death to be realistic. And he also says the film’s ending allows for different readings, like one in which Terry doesn’t forgive the cops but responds to their attack with his customary pragmatism: “He’s a good fucking guy, and he realizes that there’s an ally among them. [And] he’s got a fucking human shield.” In another interpretation, the police’s defection from Chief Burnne is motivated by a sense of cynical self-protection: “Whatever allegiance they have, how this might end up, how they have to debrief the state police, in that moment it’s like, ‘This doesn’t fucking feel right.’”
It’s important to remember, Saulnier says, that Terry “didn’t come here to make things right. He’s not on a mission of morality.” He’s on a mission of justice and survival, and that reading contextualizes the film’s final sequence, in which Terry pulls up to the hospital with Marston and Summer. While he carries Summer into the hospital, the police who served as his escort rush to Marston’s side — and neither side says anything to the other. The police once again close ranks, excluding Terry, and Terry gives them no acknowledgement or thanks. He yanks out the data recorder and the evidence needed to bring them down for attacking him and Marston in the first place, and in a fixer-inspired moment, stares off into silence while internalizing what he’s done. Rebel Ridge may not end with bloodshed as revenge. But like another great recent Netflix movie, 2022’s Athena, it emphasizes that the culture around policing has been so tainted by the failures of the force that of course its officers deserve our distrust, and of course the system protects the racist and bigoted among them, and of course such a system requires individual action against it. That might not be as extreme as some viewers want, but for a mainstream action film in a time of unshakeable Hollywood centrism, Rebel Ridge still takes a stand.
