Cold In July is a story set in 1989 about a small-town picture framer (Michael C. Hall) who kills a nighttime intruder in his home by shooting him in the head, then gets stalked and terrorized by the dead man’s crazy father (just out of prison), and who then learns that the guy he killed was not the crazy guy’s son after all, a revelation which leads them both on a journey into a world of lies, crooked deals, corruption, insanity, violence, and mayhem. It’s an outstandingly fun and unusual film, one that I highly recommend.

This film’s spirit, and to a certain extent its story, owe a strong debt to the 1980s masterpiece Body Double by Brian De Palma, an inspiration that it lives up to (and even quotes, at one point) without ever spoofing or ripping off it’s partial predecessor. I would even say that Cold in July is a bit of a paean for that bygone era. 80s cultural icons Sam Shepard and Don Johnson were disintered for two of the three leading roles, and they are both fabulous in their parts, especially Shepard, who really deserves some kind of award for his performance. The film has a 80s synthesizer score that reminds you just how marvelous and effective those old synthesizer scores were (and how surprisingly well they’ve aged). It even looks like an 80s movie – the graininess, the color saturation, the inspired camera angles, the cool visual composition of scenes – a look that is a welcome contrast to the grey/brown video-game look of modern Hollywood movies. I should add that Michael C. Hall was outstanding in the lead role, delivering a performance that reminded me so much of particular people I grew up with in the 1980s it was unreal.

This film is remarkable in so many ways! The screenplay is paced with a brisk perkiness, and despite the dark, violent direction the film takes it somehow never becomes ungrounded (indeed, it’s even a bit moving in the end,) nor does it ever lose its very pleasing, 80s artistic flair. They somehow managed to make it stylized without ever seeming so, really funny without overreaching or overplaying anything, surprising and ironic without being manipulative. Plus, it’s just plain fun, start to finish. It’s the first movie of the year that I really found myself thinking about for days afterward, the first movie of the year I would even consider for an award. I dragged my wife to it two days later, and she loved it as much as I did.

Cold in July is still hanging on at IFC, and I encourage you to catch it on the big screen while you still can! It’s really great!