Popular reviews

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★ 16

  This movie is 68 minutes long

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 8

  95/100

  Well, it makes sense that the name of the main actress happens to be Ann Savage, because that's exactly what this rugged masterwork is: fucking savage. From beginning to end, the tattered rear projections and the sweaty dialogue build the ferocious tension up to a level of murderous rage and nightmarish barbarity, further enhancing the second-rate production values and the film's constant state of alarming mystery. Only running a length of 67 minutes, the dreamlike hopelessness of Detour is akin to a vision that is only encountered because of a relentless fever.

  Suggested double feature: Detour/Lost Highway*

  *Preferably at 3 in the morning.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★

  "The world is full of skeptics." Pure fiery, sad-sack noir; brutal and miserable right up until its final frame.

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★ 2

  Deliciously nasty, style on a shoestring. Two idiots just smart enough to be a danger to each other. Distilled rotgut.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 2

  95

  Slimy, putrid, lacking even the slightest bit of nonsense. A firecracker of nihilism and detachment, and *the* film noir.

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  Review by noen ★★★★ 5

  One of the most intense and fascinating noir films I’ve ever seen. The film distills the essence of the genre with almost feverish urgency as if it were always one step away from total ruin. It’s something that goes far beyond the narrative of bad luck and cruel fate — it’s about the energy with which Ulmer directs his camera and his characters, transforming the scarcity of resources into an aesthetic of pure existential despair.

  And in the eye of the storm of all events is Vera, one of the fiercest and most ruthless femme fatales in noir. Vera is the ruin incarnate, a fierce presence that doesn’t need much to crush any hope of redemption. Unlike the sophisticated femme…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 43

  There is hardly a more deliciously feral woman in early noir history than Ann Savage in “Detour.” 

  What starts as a narrative about a hitchhiking pickup gone awry is granted an acidic bile of such toxicity that you couldn’t even try to swallow it down. 

  As a woman who barely bothers to be femme, going for one hundred percent fatale instead, Savage may well have been taking out some of her ire towards costar Tom Neal, who allegedly got obnoxiously handsy towards her on set. A slap didn’t do, so Savage did one better:

  She turned in a performance so memorable that it essentially left Neal and his own turn quivering in a corner of under compensation. 

  Director Edgar G.…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 6

  a film for those who've lived years of self-hatred, disappointment, mulling over mistakes, regrets, would-be worlds that never were going to be because you were never going to be in them -- the fool's journey begins with a single step, and the greatest traps are the ones we build for ourselves, slowly allowing our choices to pile into a suffocating cage -- ulmer's vision of noir is a voluntary purgatory, a dead-end diner in the midst of nowhere, a jukebox that only plays the songs you hate, an name that isn't yours, a pavement that hurts your feet, the fatal friction between us and everything else.

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  Review by Branson Reese

  I couldn't get enough of how mean-spirited this was. Much like Jigoku this is a morality tale about how you should never have something awful that isn't your fault happen to you. Don't even think about it, asshole.

  Everybody in this talks at a hilarious noir fever pitch. None of us Edward G. Robinson impression doing assholes born in the back half of the 20th century can touch this. It's the genuine article and it's beautiful. I've seen tons of rat-a-tat-tat noir and still I watched in awe like Sam Neill seeing a brontosaurus in person. "We clocked the Ann Savage at 32 mph"

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

  "She was young - not more than 24. Man, she looked like she had been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world. Yet in spite of that, I got the impression of beauty. Not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about when you're with your wife, but a natural beauty - a beauty that's almost homely because it's so real."

  Watched with my mom, who laughed out loud at “…or the beauty you dream about when you're with your wife."

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  Review by wersku ★★★★ 2

  An example of how a short, low-budget, and constrained film can sometimes transform its overall impact for the better. One’s own fate, pure chance. Making choices in the depths of morality and the randomness of despair.

  This is pure noir. Every conversation, every glance, every word, every scene holds meaning. Not a single moment is wasted. The film plays with light the way the mind wrestles with despair. It’s fatalism—is the story simply a surrender to fate, or is there a chance to veer off course, or you could say to take detour? That’s where its symbolic power burns brightest, sharp and unyielding.

  Ann Savage embodies the archetype of the femme fatale so vividly that she almost transforms into a…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 25

  Edward G. Ulmer's Detour has become something of a perfect noir in the minds of those who want to encapsulate the genre in a single film: it's cheap, grimy, and dark, and it stars a man whose own life would fit very nicely into the noir universe. In spite of this, though, the film diverges considerably from the genre from which it's become a signifer, something which makes it all the more interesting.

  First and most importantly, none of Al's (Neal) suffering stems from being the helpless victim of a curvy, predatory femme fatale. Instead, Al's seductress is the world around him — the environment that has fooled him into believing that anything could ever go his way. It's his…