Reel Entropy

8/10 Night, West Texas, red solo cups litter the ground. A young woman is dragged away from a party to die, witnessed only by natural gas wells churning silently in the desert. Two thousand miles away, Old Glory catches on the East River breeze and unfurls proudly over the Brooklyn Bridge as the class of Manhattan magazine writers mingles in nondescript celebration.

The wee hours of that morning, New York Magazine reporter Ben Manalowitz (B.J. Novak, who also writes and directs) gets a call from Ty Shaw (Boyd Holbrook) to tell him that his sister, Abby Shaw, is dead. Under the impression that Manalowitz was Abby’s boyfriend, the Shaw family insists he come out to Texas for the funeral, where Ty Shaw confides to him that Abby’s death, an open-and-shut overdose on the opioids readily available on the oilfield, was actually murder most foul, a conclusion based on nothing but his own intuition. Manalowitz commits to stay and record a podcast about his search for vengeance.

Vengeance hangs on a very solid “want vs need” narrative skeleton, what’s cited as a common character arc but can only really work this well in a journalism or detective story, where the main character is necessarily separate from what he’s focused on. It’s an inherently dynamic setup. The storyteller dictates the story, but the story changes the teller.