Gummo (1997)

Gummo is special because it refuses to “tell a story” the usual way; it drifts through a tornado-scarred Ohio town like a half-remembered dream, capturing moments that feel overheard rather than scripted. Harmony Korine’s eye is raw and oddly lyrical, finding flashes of humor, tenderness, and humanity in places most movies would either sanitize or sensationalize, and that honesty can be strangely mesmerizing. The vibe is grimy, unsettling, and hypnotic—more like a collage of moods and faces than a plot—yet it lingers because it feels emotionally true to a community stuck in the aftershock of disaster. This isn’t for everyone (it’s deliberately abrasive and contains genuinely disturbing material), but if you’re curious about cinema that’s daring, original, and haunting in the way it looks at broken places, Gummo is the kind of film you watch once and keep thinking about.

Gummo is Harmony Korine trying to capture a broken, post-disaster town as a collage of moods and ugly little moments rather than a normal story, and if you’re open to that, it can feel like a grimy time capsule of American decay. The problem is it often plays less like insight and more like endurance: scenes of cruelty, neglect, and shock imagery stack up without much narrative payoff, so it’s easy to come away feeling provoked rather than moved. If you need a plot, likable characters, or even a basic sense that the film respects your limits, this will likely feel repellent and self-indulgent. The redeeming qualities are its raw atmosphere and occasional flashes of strange, sad humor, but they’re buried under content that many viewers will find simply not worth sitting through.