Vengeance

Nine seasons as Ryan Howard, the opportunist of 'The Office', left B.J. Novak labelled as a sitcom comedian. 'Vengeance' peels that label off: it is his first film as a director, he wrote it as well and kept the lead for himself, and what comes out is a black comedy shaped like a mystery thriller, produced by Jason Blum at Blumhouse. It arrived as the centrepiece film of the Tribeca Festival in June 2022, and reached British cinemas that October.

Ben Manalowitz writes in New York, files the women he dates in his phone under descriptions rather than names, and dreams of the podcast that will finally give him a voice of his own. A call in the middle of the night pulls him out of that world: a stranger, Ty Shaw, tells him his sister Abilene has died of an overdose and takes it for granted that Ben was her boyfriend. With no polite way of saying no, the journalist ends up at a funeral in West Texas, welcomed as one of the family by people he has never met.

Ty doesn't believe in the overdose. He is certain his sister was murdered and he wants Ben to help him find whoever did it and avenge her. To the New Yorker, all of this is material: his producer Eloise smells a hit about grief and denial, so he stays in town with the recorder running. Between rodeos, burgers and bar-stool theories, he grows less and less sure who is using whom, and the story he came to tell starts handing him questions about himself.

The cast around him includes Boyd Holbrook as Ty, J. Smith-Cameron, Gerri in 'Succession', as the Shaw matriarch, Lio Tipton as Abilene, Dove Cameron and Isabella Amara as her sisters, Issa Rae at the other end of the phone and Ashton Kutcher as an eccentric record producer who has made Marfa his home. Kutcher, as it happens, gave Novak one of his first jobs on 'Punk'd'.

The script grew out of several research trips across Texas between 2015 and 2018, from Dallas to Fort Worth, Abilene, Merkel, Alpine, Andrews and Pecos, the town where Novak says he found the heart of the story. The shoot, though, went up in Artesia, New Mexico, in that same Pecos Valley: it began in March 2020, stopped within weeks because of the pandemic and didn't start up again until months later. The score is by Finneas O'Connell, and critics greeted the debut with praise for the writing and plenty of reservations about its closing stretch.

• Comedy
• Mystery
• Thriller