Festering racial hatred and sinister personal demons combine to make amoral monsters of four working-class Joes in the harrowing, darkly comic Suburbs. Audiences brave enough to endure brief hardcore passages (played for grins) and the apparent onscreen shooting of a dog (no laughing matter) will be rewarded, if that’s the word, by an uncompromising meditation on cruelty bred of ignorance and fear, shot through with bleak, dark humor. From Blue Velvet to Gaspar Noe, Michael Haneke to The Machinist, the concept of extraordinary brutality lurking beneath ordinary exteriors has been a subject ripe for a genre that might be called the Cinema of Endurance. For writer and theater director Vinko Moederndorfer, here making an assured helming debut from his novel, the overarching metaphor is the morally barren suburb of the soul from which senseless rage springs.
Eddie Cockrell