Ali LeRoi

(On Cable TV, October 2022) As I sometimes say, if you want to understand the not-so-hidden psychoses and fears of an era, don’t go looking at the best movies of the time—go poking in the cheap exploitation material. I strongly suspect that when future historians will want to understand the neuroses of circa-2020 Pandemic America, they could do worse than have a look at American Refugee, a film openly pretexting social order breakdown (via economic collapse) as backdrop to a power struggle with social resonance. The definition of protagonist is very much negotiable in this film featuring an estranged black couple (he: an academic; she: a doctor) whose upper-end rural home becomes a juicy target when roving bands of criminals flee the city and ransack the countryside. Fortunately, or not, their (white) neighbours are crazed survivalists who need a doctor—they end up living together in a tense philosophical standoff about who brings the most value to the arrangement. As a cut-throat, strictly utilitarian depiction of a pecking order, director Ali LeRoi’s American Refugee isn’t subtle—the opening and closing statements of the film explicitly link everything to animalistic power struggles. It feels like a tedious screed from someone who just discovered a blend of NRA propaganda and Objectivist tracts—whoever has the gun and the will to make decisions will rule, and that’s the OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE. That the one holding the gun at the end may not be a white male is not really any comfort. I expect many such thrillers over the next few years as pent-up anxieties about economic status, about vacillating democracy and ascendant fascist sympathies metastasize into an uncomfortable brew of violence and near-threats. Some analysts looking at the current state of America are predicting that the next decade (at least) will be a low-grade civil war along the lines of The Troubles—and under that lens it’s worth asking: Are movies like American Refugee reflecting or fuelling the underlying unease?