Both Dickensian and dystopian, Holler nevertheless takes place in contemporary, Trump-era Ohio. Ruth (Jessica Barden), a sharp high-schooler under the guardianship of her older brother (Gus Halper), talks her way into an illegal scrap operation when the two of them face eviction from their home. Along with a small team of equally impoverished young people, she sneaks into abandoned manufacturing facilities at night to strip them of copper, aluminum, and other valuable materials. Writer-director Nicole Riegel, making her feature debut, films these scenes like scroungy science-fiction, flashlights piercing the darkness to reveal machinery and mechanicals that have been discarded like the remains of a crashed spaceship. In the daytime scenes, Riegel arranges arresting compositions with the blighted industrial landscape (there’s an evocative shot of a despondent Ruth leaning against a wall, a flame from a factory belching out far behind her). The mood is enhanced by Gene Back’s string-heavy score, which lends added pathos to moments of everyday struggle in much the way Nicholas Britell’s music serves the films of Barry Jenkins. Barden is solid in the lead, but the standout performance comes from Pamela Adlon as Ruth’s drug-addicted mother, who is in the midst of another stint in jail. Much of Holler’s plotting feels driven by issues (factory layoffs, opioids) rather than allowing those issues to naturally exist within the narrative, but Adlon brings an exhausted authenticity to the film that makes up for it.
