Rent River's Edge (1986)

Numb and Number - River's Edge review by griggs

A film about a group of teenagers so morally anaesthetised that one of them murders his girlfriend and the rest mostly react with a shrug should be absolutely crushing. Sometimes, thanks mainly to Crispin Glover, it gets close. His Layne is all flailing limbs, bad vibes and deranged energy, as if nobody told him to tone it down and thank God for that. He's fascinating to watch.

Dennis Hopper is great too, bringing a strange, almost touching softness to Feck, a washed-up ex-biker living with an inflatable doll in what somehow ends up feeling like the healthiest relationship in the whole film. He feels a bit like Hopper's Easy Rider persona run to seed — the counterculture reduced to a shack, some junk, and a very sad idea of companionship.

The problem is everything around them. Tim Hunter absolutely gets the dead-end suburban rot of it all, but there's a fine line between capturing emotional numbness and making the audience feel numb too. Too often, River's Edge just sits there. Keanu Reeves gives it a bit of conscience, but only up to a point. There's a better, harsher film in here about the hangover from the '60s and a Reagan-era generation left spiritually hollow, but it keeps getting buried under its own blank stare.