Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 2 ratings
Solomon and Tummler are two teenagers killing time in Xenia, Ohio, a small town that has never recovered from the tornado that ravaged the community in the 1970s.
Gummo is one of the most singular and polarizing American films of the 1990s. Harmony Korine's directorial debut abandons conventional narrative almost entirely, opting for a fragmented, episodic collage of disturbing vignettes set in a post-tornado Xenia, Ohio. Cinematographically it is genuinely exceptional — a raw, deliberately degraded mix of 16mm, Super 8, and video that creates an unmistakable aesthetic texture; few films look or feel quite like it. Its novelty is equally undeniable: the non-narrative structure, the ethnographic-surrealist tone, and the unfiltered portrayal of rural American poverty give it a completely distinctive voice that no other film replicates. However, the deliberate plotlessness is a double-edged sword — there is no real narrative arc or dramatic tension, and the episodic structure means the film drifts rather than builds. Acting is largely non-professional and intentionally raw, which suits the aesthetic but produces uneven results. The ending resolves nothing by design, which is philosophically consistent but also genuinely unsatisfying as a formal conclusion.