“You need to find a fucking man. You need to have some children and do something with your fucking life”, preaches Mary’s beer-swilling brother disparagingly in an overexposed, asynchronous close-up. Next, he kicks the bucket. Any disrespectful heterosexual man won’t live to tell his tale in Sarah Jacobson's vicious underground film. Her murderous protagonist pounds, chokes, cuts, and shoots her way through the United States to the sounds of Heaven to Betsy, Gas Huffer, and... Charles Manson.

Jacobson does not shy away from dislikeability. Nineteen-year-old punker Mary is rough and aggressive, as is the DIY approach to filming this road movie. The actors appear untrained, the sound recordings crackle, and the black-and-white images are more often blurry than sharp, but this only works to the film's advantage. Punk is far from dead, but neither is love when Mary meets a male serial killer who also has it in for the patriarchy. Jacobson adds a perversely humorous dimension to the romantic archetypes in 1990s American cinema. (Flo Vanhorebeek)