‘God’s Country’ Review: Thandiwe Newton Anchors a Thriller of Escalating Disputes in Big Sky Country
24.01.2022 - 09:53
/ variety.com
Dennis Harvey Film CriticRace, class and cultural divides are probed with intriguing understatement in “God’s Country.” Julian Higgins’ first feature can be taken as a drama with thriller elements or a low-key thriller with atypical dramatic nuance, working either way as a quietly effective balance between genre, social issue and character study elements. Based on a James Lee Burke story, it stars Thandiwe Newton as a college professor whose fish-out-of-water status in rural Montana is exacerbated when she runs afoul of trespassing working-class hunters.
Too modest in scope and impact to be a major breakout title, this Sundance premiere should nonetheless attract streaming outlets and other home-format providers. The screenplay by Higgins and Shaye Ogbonna (who co-wrote 2017’s impressive, underseen crime tale “Lowlife”) is a “western” in that it’s on the laconic side verbally, at least most of the time.
Thus it’s a while before we realize that the loved one Sandra Guidry (Newton) buries at the start is her long-ailing mother, with whom she’d moved from New Orleans for a tenure-track job teaching public speaking. Indeed, it takes some time before this protagonist speaks at all: Living alone now with her dog in a secluded house, she has little need for words outside the classroom.
Still, her sense of grieving privacy violated is palpable when she returns from a morning run to find an unoccupied pickup parked on her property, a stone’s throw from her porch.The note she leaves on its windshield is ignored, and it’s back the next day, when she gets to meet the scruffy, somewhat intimidating Cody brothers, Nathan (Joris Jarsky) and Samuel (Jefferson White from “Yellowstone”). They aren’t very apologetic about using her
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