Dark Places
Insurance fraud as drama, this is weird. I thought only Suburbicon dabbled on that theme, it’s a genre now. “Angel of Debt” is a great moniker. Did not know this was a Gillian Flynn book adaptation, Gone Girl is less rural.
The linchpin of the plot is the Kansas prairie massacre, where a mother and three children were murdered one night, while one survived. Their teenage brother was blamed, and is in jail for over 20 years, but of course it’s not what it seems.
When the mystery is solved, it’s all a tragic fuck up: the mother wasn’t able to keep up the family, since the farm had some debts, and her deadbeat husband was fleecing them for beer money (even though he was a drug dealer). She met this “Angel of Debt”, a guy willing to “break” into her house, “steal” her money, and “kill” her, so that the life insurance kicks in and her kids can live a better life in the city with their aunt. Apparently this dude did this loads of times.
Sadly, her particular family arrangement borked this. That was the night the teenage boy was running away from home with his gold digger pregnant girlfriend (the bitch). One of the sisters was blathering at school about her being a slut, so she drags her out of bed and murders her. The other sister panics, the Angel of Debt sees he’s going down and shotguns the kid, just like that. Libby is the girl who lived, by hiding in a chicken coop.
Years later, after the teenage boy has been in prison for so long, a Kill Club hires deadbeat Libby to dig around so they prove he is innocent. The teenage boy’s plot thickens, apparently he was involved with some satanic drug dealers (including her girlfriend), killing cows hopped up on angel dust or whatever. Plus, a little girl with a crush on him was accusing him of rape. That’s why he was so easily jailed.
Libby finds all the protagonist years later: her father is still a deadbeat hobo, the girl that falsely accused her brother is a stripper, but his brother’s girlfriend is another deadbeat murderer living on an assumed name. And the lovechild lives, and together they try to murder Libby when she comes knocking. There’s a nice scene mirroring the start of the film, the massacre night, but the cops catch her and his brother is released, since the Angel of Debt is caught at the same time by the Kill Club.
For Gillian Flynn, men are just along for the ride, the woman drive the plot from both directions. There’s gold digger murderous bitches fleecing their husbands, bit also kindhearted women trying to help. The dudes just follow along.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.