Small Town Murder Songs

A hidden indie gem with a great central performance from Peter Stormare, if you're interested in small town crime fiction or slightly-creepy drama then you should get some enjoyment out of this. Stormare is one of those character actors who usually gets cast in weird supporting roles (you might know him from Fargo, Jurassic Park 2 or even his turn as an angry chef in Season 6 of Weeds) so I went into this thinking he would be hamming it up or underplaying it in a desperate attempt to take it seriously. He's actually really good though, completely different to anything I've seen him do before, and it makes me wish he got meatier parts like this more often.

Stormare plays Walter, a small town born-again Christian cop with a dark past. When a dead body turns up in town he finds himself shadowed by FBI agents as he attempts to work his way back into the world he turned his back on, and he must overcome both his troubled past and the prejudices of the townsfolk in this fishbowl of a place. It's a small story, and one primarily informed by character, and some viewers will inevitably draw comparisons with Fargo in the way it combines a quirky self-contained story of murder with folksiness. Small Town Murder Songs does its own thing though, it's more serious, and uses Christian themes and a gospel motif to strike a unique tone of redeption and isolation.

The single best thing about the film is the amazing soundtrack of modern indie gospel songs. They combine with the subject matter to create a gothic/folksy edge, making it feel like a film version of the songs Everything's Turning to White by Paul Kelly and Where the Wild Roses by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue. And that can't be a bad thing, we need more films like this. I saw Walter's slow-burn resistance to cracking as being similar to Klaus Kinski in the classic Herzog film Woyzeck. For anyone worried about watching a 'Christian' film, it isn't really like that... the Christian stuff is just there to add some colour, it could be any religion or any small faith-based community. It's like a serious snapshot, or a hick-tinged film noir. It's just a good, underrated film.

DIRECTOR: Ed Gass-Donelly
WRITER/SOURCE: Ed Gass-Donnelly
KEY ACTORS: Peter Stormare, Martha Plimpton, Jill Hennessey, Aaron Poole, Amy Rutherford, Jessica Clement, Jackie Burroughs, Stephen Eric McIntyre

RELATED TEXTS:
- Canadian writer-director Ed Gass-Donnelly previously made the Toronto-set film This Beautiful City.
- Other folk film noirs/crime dramas... Frozen River, Fargo, Winter's Bone, Blood Simple and Badlands.