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'Assassination Nation' Is a Wild Movie About Everything Wrong with America

You need to see this bloody high school flick that was too hot for Facebook and Instagram.
From left: Em (Abra), Lily (Odessa Young), Bex (Hari Nef) and Sarah (Suki Waterhouse) in ASSASSINATION NATION. Courtesy of NEON.

Assassination Nation, a new film about four teen girls who take up arms against a bloodthirsty mob, is brutally timely—and just plain brutal. No spoilers, but what starts as a stylized snapshot of high school hedonism devolves into carnage like something out of The Purge by the movie’s end. The film’s distributor has even had trouble advertising on social media—Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube say trailers for the film violate their community standards. (Which, if you ask us, is kind of the best buzz a movie like Assassination Nation could get in this day and age.)

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To be fair, Assassination Nation warns viewers upfront that it isn’t a feel-good movie. It opens with a “trigger warning” that the movie contains themes of: bullying, abuse, classism, death, drinking, drug use, social content, toxic masculinity, homophobia, transphobia, guns, nationalism, racism, kidnapping, the male gaze, sexism—and last but not least—giant frogs. The movie is a molotov cocktail of all that is wrong with America in 2018, and it’s pretty hard to swallow.

Odessa Young stars as Lily, the teen girl who gets targeted when a hacker releases the data, and therefore the dark secrets of an entire small town. It's a zeitgeisty retelling of the Salem witch trials that's drawing comparisons to another bloody high school flick, Heathers from 1988. In the clip below, made exclusive to VICE, Lily is confronted by the principal of her high school over some X-rated nudes she drew in class, and her retort might as well be lifted from the #FreeTheNipple debate raging over female censorship on social media:

Assassination Nation hits theaters September 21.

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