107 min | R | July 29, 2022 | Focus Features
B.J. Novak plays a New York writer who flies to West Texas for the funeral of a woman he barely dated, then mines her family’s grief for a podcast. The brother wants vengeance. The writer just wants a great episode.
Ben Manalowitz is a New York writer who treats women as contacts and conversations as material. He gets a late-night call that Abilene, a woman he can barely place, has died. Her family believes he was her boyfriend and flies him to West Texas for the funeral. Her brother Ty insists she was murdered and wants Ben to help avenge her. Ben sees a podcast where the Shaws see a tragedy. The film is about the stories Americans build to make their losses mean something and the coastal opportunist who turns a family’s grief into content.
B.J. Novak plays Ben with practiced detachment that curdles as the Shaw family pulls him closer. He holds the irony up like a shield and lets it slip in small, telling beats. Boyd Holbrook plays Ty Shaw with grief and certainty, a man who needs the murder to be real because the alternative is unbearable. J. Smith-Cameron plays Sharon Shaw, the mother, with a warmth that exposes Ben’s condescension for what it is. Ashton Kutcher plays Quentin Sellers, a record producer who speaks in unhurried monologues about meaning and memory, and he underplays the part into something genuinely unsettling. Issa Rae plays Eloise, the producer back in New York, feeding Ben’s ambition from a safe distance.
B.J. Novak directs his first feature and writes the screenplay. The script is precise about the texture of a region the protagonist arrives to exploit. Novak catalogs the Whataburger devotion, the rodeo, and the family that talks past its own contradictions without condescending to any of it. He frames Ben against wide Texas horizons that dwarf him and shoots New York as a cramped series of glowing screens. That contrast carries the theme without a line of dialogue. The open exteriors give the satire room to breathe while Ben keeps trying to compress everything into a single thesis.
Vengeance sets up a darker film than the one it delivers. The premise points toward a savage indictment of the content economy and the writer who strip-mines real pain for a narrative. Novak builds that machine with care and then loses his nerve at the exact moment it should close on him. The observations stay sharp while the satire pulls its punch. There is a meaner, braver version of this story that follows its own logic all the way down. This one settles for being clever about a subject that earned cruelty.