Friends who work at the local frozen-foods plant pass along reject dinners so Ruth can eat, though cooking means boiling bottled water over a gas stove because the other utilities have been cut off. Her mother (Pamela Adlon) got hooked on painkillers after injuring her hand and is now trying to detox in prison (where the comedian can’t resist cracking jokes during visitation scenes). Life isn’t fair, and it shows on the face of British actor Jessica Barden (“The Lobster”), whose remarkable performance illuminates this unvarnished dive into tough, small-town survival … and escape.Ī resilient spark plug in a box of rusted parts, Ruth represents a huge swath of the American public rarely seen on-screen: young people without iPhones and Instagram accounts, just struggling to get by. Ruth, the resourceful Ohio high school student at the heart of writer-director Nicole Riegel’s open-wound debut, has been forced to grow up too soon. There’s a distracting practice in American cinema of casting actors who are already well into their 20s to play teens, although “ Holler” contains one of the few examples in recent memory where an age difference of nearly a decade, while noticeable, works to the film’s advantage.
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May 2023
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