91 min | R | June 11, 2021 | IFC Films
Ruth is a teenager in a dying Ohio town who tears copper and steel out of abandoned buildings to keep the lights on. A college acceptance dangles a way out, if she can survive long enough to take it. Holler knows that doing everything right is no match for a town built to keep you down.
Ruth is a teenager in a hollowed-out Ohio town. The factories closed and the jobs left. She strips copper and metal from abandoned buildings and sells the scrap to survive. A college acceptance offers a way out. Holler is about the cost of leaving and the cost of staying. It refuses to pretend the choice is clean.
Jessica Barden plays Ruth with a hard, watchful intelligence. She carries the film on her shoulders. Ruth is smart and proud and cornered, and Barden shows all three without a speech that announces any of them. Pamela Adlon plays Rhonda, Ruth’s mother, worn down to a frayed nerve, and she makes her handful of scenes land. Gus Halper plays Blaze, Ruth’s older brother, who works the scrap beside her and wants her gone even though leaving means losing her. Austin Amelio plays Hark, the man who runs the scrapping crew and pays cash to anyone willing to take the bigger risk.
Nicole Riegel writes and directs her first feature, and she shoots her hometown terrain with a documentary eye for texture. The cinematography favors grain over polish. Rust, copper, and torchlight read as physical objects, and the camera holds on hands at work until the labor becomes the subject. Riegel cuts between the danger of the scrapping and the quiet of Ruth’s interior life without softening either. The score stays sparse and lets the clang of metal and the hum of dead factories do the work. Nothing here is decorated.
This is a film about the lie that hard work alone fixes a rigged situation. Ruth does everything right and the structure around her keeps collapsing. Riegel does not turn the poverty into misery for its own sake, and she does not pretend a college brochure solves it. The shape of the story is familiar. The honesty in the details is not. Holler ends without promising that Ruth will be fine, because it respects her too much to lie.