Neil Maskell stars as Bull. He does not appear to be a killer, but more like the bearded guy who kicks off open mic night with an Oasis cover. It’s great casting by appearance alone, and makes him all the more shocking when he does pounce, when his knives comes out abrasive fashion. We learn he’s the heavy of his group of baddies, he’s the guy who walks into the room and takes things to an extreme when his boss, Norm, wants to make a point to his “clients.” “Bull” does a great job in keeping the violence is horrific and unsettling, ruthless. The movie even starts with slasher logic, as if we were watching a Jason Voorhees kill people with the same indifference. When we first see Bull kill, it’s a slow walk to an open garage and some shots—Neeson-type stuff, just like the opera music that bookends the killing. The next time, it’s a man who is duct-taped to a chair, and while a woman pleads with Bull, he mechanically stabs bound man in the gut and throat. It shows the true horror of revenge, also like Jeremy Saulnier films do, but with even more of a serial killer angle. Pairing that notion with intimate violence, of “family” members putting power moves over each other by showing up at each other's houses, is discomfiting and it keeps you watching.
Why is Bull so unflappably pissed? The story balances his current revenge plot with a history of marriage, death, and his son, and while it’s a little tricky to put together at first, the ease of going back and forth becomes a part of its collective state of mind, one that’s drenched in brutality, while showing the frailty of family. Norm, it turns out, is Bull’s father-in-law, portrayed like an army tank by David Hayman, who is one side frightening, the other side grandfatherly. Meanwhile in the present timeline, images briefly flash back to a trailer being lit on fire. Throughout the story, we learn who is in that trailer, and what happened the night it was torched. The true story is even more bizarre and worse than we think, and in writer/director Williams’ confidence he builds our understanding of it parallel to our modern-time discomfort with what Bull will do next.
Williams has made an incredibly stirring, chilling study of violence that is more unhinged than most others, so much that while watching it, "Bull" seems to go completely out of control. Maskell’s performance, for one, becomes even more cartoonish and villainous, his eyes bulging, his laughs more menacing. In these parts, it seems like the movie has lost focus of the coldness it originally established. Not so. "Bull" is one of those movies that plays even better when you revisit its gruesome parts in your memory, as they become even more expressive when you know the whole story. The movie is also highly amused with itself, and places pivotal being-held-at-knife-point scenes on amusement park rides, which becomes one of its freakier aspects. It’s all part of how “Bull” always keeps you disoriented, never taking it easy, and locking you in. Even when its final shots present you with an explanation, it doesn’t care if you buy it all or not. That only makes me admire it more.
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