God's Country

I came in hoping for a good story, but left shaking my head at the many lost opportunities to make it one. If you like being preached at for an hour and 43 minutes, this may be the film for you.

Besides the incessant lecturing, the movie had the pacing of a 78 played on a 45 player, the villains were all caricatures of bad people, and the protagonist was a preachy, "I know better than you about everything because" kind of a person.

The most interesting part of this movie was when I dropped a Milk Dud between my legs and spent 10 minutes groping around trying to find it.

See this movie only if you hate yourself.

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"God's Country features a remarkable lead performance from Thandiwe Newton, but the unfocused, predictable screenplay makes this film too dull to remember. Technically, it's one of the strongest movies of the festival. Gorgeous cinematography, sweet score, gripping atmosphere -- it holds the essential technical ingredients for a great film.

However, by attempting to tackle many different subject matters, Julian Higgins isn't able to properly concentrate and exceptionally develop a single one. In addition to this, the protagonist carries relatable motivations, but her consequent actions feel contradictory. The racism and sexism that she has to deal with are real, but her way of confronting these situations is far from exemplary.

Finally, the impactful ending beautifully works in theory, but since everything plot-wise is so unsurprising and slow-paced, the viewers will probably feel too tired to care by the end."

Rating: C.

College professor Sandra (Thandiwe Newton) lives alone in the middle of nowhere Montana after losing her mother. Two local hunters keep trespassing on her property. The confrontations slowly build. She's struggling with an unevolved superior at work. The acting sheriff is limited help. The actual sheriff is on leave after shooting a local.

This movie is quiet. In a way, it's too quiet. Newton is doing good quiet with simmering rage. The tree farm confrontation is good tension. So is the invitation into the trailer home. There are moments and scenes with great tension. Mostly, the movie is way too quiet and the tension slips. It needs to build the tension, but Sandra doesn't change. It's a little flat.

God's Country is disqualified from being considered "bad" by its performances and cinematography alone. The film is largely breathtaking to behold, even when it at times becomes dull from a storytelling standpoint.

And this is where the film falters: its storytelling.

The "plot" technically has an inciting incident, but is really just a meandering series of events that make up a 90-minute petty neighborhood feud between a grieving Karen and a group of spited pseudo-alpha-males.

Given what we come to know about Cassandra's character background, some of the plot's events do hit pretty hard emotionally, especially the film's final 5 minutes and it's EXCELLENT final one-take scene.

But the brilliant conclusion does feel like a bit too little too late, as a great chunk of the story feels largely inconsequential to the film's larger themes that it's going for.

This movie is essentially an art house upsell of something like I Spit On Your Grave. About 30 or 40 minutes into it, when the professor meets one of the hunters in the little church and finds common ground with him (I won't spoil how) I thought the movie might turn into something redemptive for both of these characters. Nothing doing. Instead of such a turn, it devolves into stereotype and cliché, and exactly the end you could predict. You want Trump Country "deplorables" you got them. You want a clueless "woke" interloper, you got that. Yet in the end, all the issues are resolved with a shotgun, hardly any sort of politically correct finish. If the point of this movie is just an ironic play on the idea that God is nowhere to be found in that place, or in any of these people, the point is pretty overtly made. That doesn't mean it's bad or unwatchable. It's neither, but it's not gory enough to be a successful exploitation film, nor creative enough to be a true art film. It's nicely filmed and definitely conveys the damnation of its people and place through its cinematography, and while none of the main antagonist characters, as written, are deep, complex or unique, they are all well portrayed by the actors. A better example of something with a similar theme might be Wind River.