Keanu Reeves’ brand of blank-faced, affectless, trying really hard acting is easy to mock: you’ve probably intoned “I know Kung Fu” at least once since The Matrix came out. His presence as a pretty-but-not-terribly-talented actor can hide the fact that Keanu Reeves tackles challenging roles as often as he does mainstream ones. The most well-known “difficult” Reeves movie is My Own Private Idaho, but he started out his acting career in earnest with River’s Edge, a movie in which aimless 80’s teens—too poor to be popular, too dumb to be special and artsy—move through a desolate Northern California town in a drug-induced stupor as they try to figure out how to deal with one of their friends murdering his girlfriend.

River’s Edge is a weird movie. Not just because of the subject matter, but because the film seems to have absolutely no point of view. The camera sits there, watching these kids wander around a miserable landscape during one of the ugliest months of the year—maybe February—in a town full of strip malls and leafless trees and grey skies that never seem to rain. In the opening scene, the murderer (called John by his friends, though his name is Samson) sits by a blinding, blue-white figure, shouting at the cars on a nearby road. As the camera comes closer, we see that he’s seated next to the cold, dead body of his girlfriend, Jamie. You can see him and the body from the road, but he seems uninterested in covering her up; his crime isn’t conscious enough to make him realize he should hide it. This scream at the beginning of the movie seems desperate at first; however, when John later talks about the moment of murdering Jamie, he portrays it more as a cry of triumph. This murder is the first time he’s taken control of something in his small, inconsequential life.

These teenagers, the film seems to assert, are so divorced from any empathy for others or coherent sense of self that they don’t even have the charming verve of genuine self-destructive behavior. As John shows Jamie’s dead body to his friends Layne (Crispin Glover) and Matt (Keanu Reeves)—and later to their girlfriends—the characters seem to be trying to figure out exactly how to feel something. Matt (the more sensitive of the bunch) vaguely senses that something is wrong, but he doesn’t move to tell the police about the body until Layne’s girlfriend, Clarissa (Ione Skye), calls him and confesses her discomfort. “Jamie was our friend, too,” she says aloud earlier in the film, as if trying to understand why she can’t get behind Layne’s plan to hide John and protect him at all costs. These teenagers seem to lack the ability to process emotion, possessing only a nagging sense that they should feel bad. The tension between knowing how you should feel and not feeling anything at all fuels the movie, particularly Reeves’ character. Matt halfheartedly becomes the hero of the story, despite not really knowing why he turns John in to the police, or why he should care about the death of a girl he didn’t even like that much.

The only exception here is Crispin Glover, who plays Layne as a California stoner on speed; he has all of the surfer affectations of Spicoli with about twenty times as much nervous energy. Still, he seems blank, too—he displaces the emotion he should feel at finding a dead body into a single-minded determination to protect John, who doesn’t seem all that interested in being protected. We also have Feck (played with his usual goofy intensity by Dennis Hopper), a drug dealer who gives his weed away for free, lives with a blow-up doll, and brags of having killed his girlfriend years before—an experience which makes Feck a natural ally when Layne decides to hide John.

In many movies about the human capacity for evil, the “evil” character is highly intelligent, and that intelligence is the problem: take the classical-music loving Nazi or serial killer with a PhD, for example. But evil in River’s Edge translates into a lack of empathy, and thus a lack of intelligence and imagination. You have to be able to see that others are as fully human as you are to truly have empathy. This is a cognitive leap that even the sympathetic characters in River’s Edge don’t seem to be able to make. They act in evil ways because they simply can’t give a shit enough to act otherwise. Because the characters seem so dull—so slow to move, so devoid of any emotional core or depth—it’s a difficult to movie to watch. You want to shake these teenagers into some kind of movement, to make them care, but they wade through a thick fog of half-formed thoughts and dim, follow-the-leader behavior.

And this is why River’s Edge is Keanu Reeves’ best movie. There’s something about that blank, pretty face that screams dumb, even if you know he’s not. Have you ever seen Keanu Reeves express an emotion with his face? I haven’t. Something about Reeves’ stony, Greek-statue composure makes the role of an emotionless, inert teen perfect for him. Reeves is great as Matt because he allows the audience to see emotion fighting beneath that impassive exterior, but coming out inarticulate. This is not to knock Reeves; he has a weird charm, despite his limits as an actor. But boy, does he have limits. His acting is most effective when he uses those limits to his advantage.

River’s Edge is a downer with just enough off-kilter characters to make it unsettling, not funny or absurd like a Lynch movie. It makes evil seem as mundane as getting high off of your parents’ stash of weed or having bad sex with your high school boyfriend. The characters are so unrelentingly depressing that it’s hard to really like River’s Edge—it’s a movie you can admire as an exercise in depicting alienation and despair with as little sentimentality as possible, but may never truly enjoy.

Letitia Trent is a writer and poet living in Arkansas. She tumbls here.