Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Holler’ on VOD, a Gritty Poverty-Drama About High-Stakes Metal Scrappers

New VOD release Holler goes hard on the hardscrabble, telling a story about metal scrappers living in a grungy working-class Ohio burg. Nicole Riegel’s directorial debut stars up-and-comer Jessica Barden (of Netflix series The End of the F***ing World) in a role that echoes Jennifer Lawrence’s Oscar-nominated breakout performance in Winter’s Bone. We’ve seen many examples of this type of stripped-to-the-bone indie drama, but maybe one playing out in a scungy scrapyard will show us something new.

HOLLER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Ruth (Barden) and her older brother Blaze (Gus Halper) hustle hard in the winter chill, tossing trash bags full of aluminum cans into his pickup truck. They’ll sell them to a scrapyard for a sum that amounts to not much. A few stray snowflakes flutter through the gray sky; a set of railroad tracks line the edge of a row of weathered homes; in the background, an orange and white smokestack spews plumes. The town lives and dies on manufacturing, like at the TV-dinner factory where Ruth and Blaze’s mother worked, before she was injured on the job, became addicted to painkillers and ended up in jail. They scratch and claw, but the eviction notices pile up and the water gets shut off.

Ruth barely bothers to go to school, and might not graduate at the end of the year. Blaze secretly scraped up $75 to submit her college application, and she got accepted, but actually attending seems impossible — she’s smart and likely to do well, but it’s not affordable, and she’d be leaving her brother to fend for himself. On top of that, a teacher pulls her aside and tells her that college isn’t a viable choice for “people like you.” Yes. “People like you.” Even her mother (Pamela Adlon) says, during a visit to the correctional facility, that college is a bad idea. Too expensive? Or should she accept her fate as a local factory worker, notably at factories that all seem to be closing down as their owners open cheap-labor facilities outside the country?

A solution presents itself, but it’s not a great one. Hark (Austin Amelio) offers them gigs at the scrapyard: They’ll help process the metal after they break into some of their depressed town’s many abandoned buildings under cover of darkness and steal iron, aluminium, wiring, copper. He’s making extraordinary cash — get this — selling the scrap to Chinese manufacturing concerns. On their first night out, they break into a school and Ruth walks past an abandoned pile of American flags unceremoniously tossed on the floor before she busts through a ceiling and starts cutting into tubing and ductwork. There’s some symbolism for you.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Riegel’s work here is often compared to Debra Granik’s films — Holler has the gritty lower-class setting of Winter’s Bone, and Barden’s performance is reminiscent of Thomasin McKenzie’s in Leave No Trace. The movie’s simmering subtext shows shades of the rob-the-banks-that-foreclosed-on-them plot of Hell or High Water.

Performance Worth Watching: Barden plays Ruth with tenacity and confidence, crafting her as more than just a figure of lost innocence — and as someone with the wisdom to recognize that her youth and smarts allow her a way out of a dire situation.

Memorable Dialogue: Two lines sum up Ruth’s challenges.

One, when Ruth tells Hark how she got a scar on her arm: “Getting a knife away from my mom.”

Two, when she tells her mother she’s been accepted to higher education: “We’re not college people,” her mother says.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Holler is strong but familiar, a story of poverty-line struggle that’s deeply critical of American capitalism. In an early scene, Blaze and Ruth haul a sorry load of pop cans to the scrapper as President Trump gives a pathetic speech promising “jobs, jobs, jobs,” and in this context, his voice sounds even more gratingly out-of-touch than usual. The movie becomes the modern Robin Hood story: The protagonists steal from the rich and give to the poor, namely, themselves, because they really don’t have any other options. I’d say it’s a righteous middle finger in the face of corporate America, except it doesn’t have a face, despite the moronic concept of “corporate personhood.”

Riegel shot the film in grainy 16mm on handheld cameras for maximum capital-R Reality, the scrapper crew’s headlamps cutting through the dark dramatically, exploiting the immediacy and tension of a dangerous gig. Beyond that, Holler goes through the motions: a touch of poverty porn, a smiling villain, a damaged parental figure, indifferent institutions and maybe an exit ramp for young Ruth. Riegel cultivates truth and honesty in the visual detail of a coarse, unforgiving environment, but her characters’ inner lives don’t run quite deep enough, and the film only packs a mild dramatic punch.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Holler is a sturdy debut with modest ambition and just enough artistic vision to warrant recommendation. Meanwhile, we’ll keep our eyes open for Riegel’s follow-up feature.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Holler