There’s a certain tingle that sets in when you realize that a thriller is naturalistic enough not to rely on thriller tricks.
It means that you may be denied some of the knee-jerk pleasures audiences have come to expect — the jump scares and violent climaxes.
The tradeoff is that it’s a lot easier to place yourself in the main characters’ shoes, to imagine what they’re going through as something that might actually be happening.
And that, ironically, just ups the thriller juice.“Blow the Man Down,” directed by Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy (it’s their first feature), is a drama of murder, sex, and small-town secrets set in Easter Cove, a fishing village in Maine that brings to mind the windswept coastal town of “Manchester by the Sea” — in fact, the place is so tiny and barren and gnarled it makes Manchester by the Sea look like Rome.
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