plug: Blow the Man Down (2020)

Amazon’s modern nautical Western about women just tryna live.

We’re north of two months into quarantine now and several movies have made their streaming premieres with varying degrees of pomp and circumstance. Blow the Man Down premiered on Amazon Prime right when the pandemic popped off in earnest, and it’s one of those quiet festival movies that’s flown largely under the radar since becoming widely available. It’s not necessarily my favorite movie to come out during the pandemic, but it’s certainly one of the more memorable ones, and absolutely something you should watch if you care about watching movies that are both new and good.

Blow the Man Down takes place in a small East Coast fishing town where a group of women have literally had to construct a brothel in order to minimize the damage done by generations of pillaging fisherman who’ve made port over the years. The plot centers on a pair of sisters (Sophie Lowe, Morgan Saylor) who find themselves wrapped up in a murder cover-up after one of them kills a local scoundrel in self defense.

On the surface, Blow the Man Down may feel like “Fargo with Lobsters,” and there’s definitely a Coen Brothers-esque sensibility in there somewhere. But I’d describe it more as a “nautical noir-Western” of sorts, populated by characters (mostly women) who would normally be peripheral to, or even absent from a story like this.

The entire cast of relatively unknown character actors is pretty phenomenal and well worth the price of admission (which, if you have Amazon Prime, is $0 upfront anyway), though the real showstopper among them is Margo Martindale as brothel owner Enid, a shrewd operator who serves as both a fascinating antagonist and sympathetic avatar for both the rot and resilience at the heart of the town. Martindale is an actress you’ve likely seen in a hundred movies and shows over the years (she’s currently crushing it on FX’s Mrs. America), so it’s a real treat to see her doing something this badass, front and center.

Blow the Man Down was directed by two women (Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy). I only point that out because I recently plugged another film directed by two women, and I said something about that film that just as easily applies to this one — “Everything about it feels just familiar enough to be inviting, but also new and fresh in ways that defy description (turns out, that’s what happens when you let more women direct movies).”