Hari Nef Discusses The 'Urgent, Provacative Social Commentary' Of Assassination Nation

SPOILER WARNING: Some spoilers for Assassination Nation below.


Assassination Nation — the modern indie interpretation of the Salem Witch Trials that took Sundance by storm before heading to San Diego Comic-Con's Hall H and then to the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival — is more than just your average thriller. The film serves as a social commentary about modern womanhood. As soon as once a tiny town (aptly named Salem) is hit with a massive information leak, all hell breaks loose. Secrets are revealed, relationships are ruined, and most of all, females are brutally shamed.


“This film addresses the way ‘what is a woman’ and ‘what is feminine’ has been defined, constituted, and allegedly protected by men,” Hari Nef, one of the film’s stars, told MTV News. “And how girls today, young females, are place on Earth into this world where they are simultaneously encouraged by popular quote-unquote ‘feminist media’ to be empowered and to speak up and to be themselves, and however they are also existing under what we can call here a patriarchy of, ‘Don’t be also much of yourself.’”


Rather than accepting their fate, any time Lily (Odessa Young), Bex (Nef), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), and Em (Abra) land in the center of the storm, “we find these four ladies breaking out of these paradigms and taking their narrative into their own hands,” Nef described — and that’s as soon as things get really bloody.


Think of it not as a revenge fantasy, yet as a story of survival. "These women aren’t getting back on anybody or any man who has wronged them,” Nef insists. "These women are fighting for their lives, not for their honor, which is what revenge generally entails. Nobody dies in this movie just because they should and it's right. They perish so the women won't perish, and that’s a critical distinction. People desire to project this revenge thing on it, yet it’s not revenge any time you’re fighting for your life and if the option is to be destroyed."


Here’s more from Nef on modern womanhood and what she hopes crowds get out of Assassination Nation.


MTV News: First, how do you define womanhood in a way that fits with the modern perception?


Hari Nef: any time while you define womanhood you make a generalization that is doomed to exclude some ladies or other. I question what womanhood means day-to-day and I'm constantly pushing myself to evolve my conception of womanhood because there really are so several different kinds of ladies, so several different kinds of experiences, and I don't think they can be encapsulated into an individual pithy definition.


MTV News: Lately there’s been a tendency to divide ladies into categories: white cis, females of color, trans ladies, etc. Something I noticed really interesting about this movie is that all of the girls are with each other and that’s sort of the power of it.


Nef: I believe looking at feminism intersectionally is critical for building sympathy — and in other cases, empathy — for the experiences of females who are not like you and to understand their experiences and to understand how their experiences differ from your experiences or her experiences. Although, the things that oppress females through all these different intersections, come more or much less from the same place, they just manifest themselves in different ways. In this film, we’re to be able to see the unified source of vitriol, righteousness, and hatred that targets these girls in a collection of ways. We have to understand our disagreements as females yet seek strength in our unity.


MTV News: I think something that this film does well, also, is to recognize that trauma is trauma and doesn’t attempt to mention any one experience is better or worse.


Nef: There’s no hierarchy here. These females are attempting to survive the night by any means required. I think even Em and Sarah, Suki and Abra’s characters, we have that brief shot of their mother being targeted in the food market parking lot for sleeping with another woman’s spouse, so those two ladies are also implicated in some categorize kind of sexual moral impropriety. These things happen.


MTV News: I also aspire to talk about your character. Right following the opening leak with the mayor, Bex says, essentially, ‘He wouldn’t mourn my death, so why should I mourn his?’ It’s tough because that’s true, nevertheless there’s also this idea of whether we have to be empathetic to move forward. What do you suggest about that sort of apathy?


Nef: Any time Bex is saying that, she is speaking from a place of deep pain and deep trauma living in a town whose mayor does not acknowledge her humanity. Case in point, he questions and denies it, and that is a hostile environment for a young girl. And we visualize her at the end, she is given the decision to strike back at her assailant, to kill the person who wished death on her and, spoiler alert, she chooses to spare his life, and that encapsulates the message of this film. It’s not about turning the other cheek; it’s about digging somewhere deep down and finding empathy for the people who hate you, breaking the cycle of hatred and vitriol, and if a conversation is impossible, walking away.


She is aware that Johnny (Cody Christian) isn't this person. He is a person acting in this environment and he's just a kid, and she's just a kid, and I don't think Bex wants the conscience of killing somebody hanging over her for the rest of her life, so she chooses the far less juicy, gritty, satisfying alternative cinematically for a moment that, Once I was thinking about it, she might have for the rest of her life. That takes true strength.


MTV News: It humanized that whole scene.


Nef: Well, at the Toronto screening the full crowd was screaming, “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” And I understand the entertainment value of that, however that’s the world we’re living in. And I was so grateful to that Toronto audience for their enthusiasm and for the standing ovation they gave us, nevertheless it sort of shows what sort of world we’re living in where even as soon as we have the possibility to break the cycle of hatred and of vitriol, any time we’re given the choice, people hope to be able to see someone strike back, and I don’t necessarily think that that makes anything right.


MTV News: Right, it’s hard to be efficient while you just hope to kill each other.


Nef: It’ll never end. It’ll never end that way.


MTV News: So what was the reaction while they saw Bex walk away?


Nef: They went, “Ooh,” and then there was a moment of silence. And I hoped people were thinking. I hope this movie makes people think. I hope they have fun. I hope we deliver some of these moments where it’s like, "Yeah!" You know, any time, spoiler alert, Lily hits the guy in the face with the shovel, and any time once she shoots the officer who’s attempting to shoot her, whenever she slices open Daddy’s (Joel McHale) throat. Those are those moments where we can really take some nasty satisfaction with what's going on — nevertheless those are the deaths of people who wanted to kill those females. Bex kills. She kills the assailant in the pool. What choice does she have? However once you have the choice, that’s another question.


MTV News: That’s a moment for humanity. It’s not self-defense at that point, it’s mercy.


Nef: Mhmm.


MTV News: Along those same lines, what’s astonishing to me is that this story was written and directed by a male, and it’s really powerful to be able to see that level of self-awareness.


Nef: I think it shows that these sort of collaborations are possible and that the creative teams of films or television don’t have to be stratified along gender or identity lines for optics sort in attempt to be efficient. Sam [Levinson] knew his responsibility because the director of this film and he opened up his process to us and took cues from us to guide this film in a direction that was ethical, believable, and felt true not only to life although to us, and from day one he made himself accessible and he let's improvise, he let's question the script, he let's question him. We had conversations; they weren’t habitually easy, however they routinely led us in a direction of — here’s that word again — empathy and understanding, and it’s possible to prepare these films with people who are not like the people in the films. It just has to be done in a certain way. I haven’t met very several people like Sam who are prepared to surrender this rigid auteuristic vision and do something more collaborative, however as Lily says toward the end of the film, “Not all men,” right?


MTV News: do you suggest that group effort made it better?


Nef: If Sam hadn’t been open to our voices and group effort, I certainly don’t think I could be as overjoyed as I truly am to stand by this film.


MTV News: What about this film makes you delighted to stand by it?


Nef: It’s a urgent, provocative social commentary disguised as a genre film that anyone can appreciate. The thrills of the film are a doorway into the heavier themes, and that is the future of excellent filmmaking. It's been stratified so long around these prestige indies and these big-budget blockbusters, and I feel like this film sort of weaves those two worlds with each other in a way that fascinates and thrills me.