Private Monsters

There’s this gap. The version of me people see and the version I actually am. I’m decent enough when it matters—patient with friends, not gratuitously cruel, conscious of how I move through the world. But alone in my apartment with my phone I’m something else. Different thoughts. Different searches. Different resentments. The kinds of things that would change how people see me if they surfaced.

Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation starts from that premise. A hacker in a small town leaks everyone’s secrets—their searches, their messages, the stuff they thought was buried. Everyone gets exposed at the same time, and the town immediately implodes. Neighbors turn on each other. Mobs form. The violence is swift and casual, like people were just waiting for permission to hurt each other.

The film focuses on a group of high school girls—the kind who run the school, who are used to getting what they want. Once the secrets are public they become hunters. The film frames them as predators, which is interesting because it doesn’t let the audience off the hook either. There’s something satisfying about watching them exact revenge on people who wronged them, and the film knows you feel that satisfaction and wants to complicate it.

What lingers is the question underneath: is the gap necessary? Is hypocrisy the price of living in society, or is it a lie we can’t afford to keep telling? I don’t know. I just know the gap exists. I know what I look like from the outside doesn’t match what I think about from the inside. And I know that’s probably true for everyone watching the film too. That’s the discomfort it trades in.