For my final movie for the weekend, I opted for God’s Country, a movie I had never heard about until I happened to see a trailer before another recent movie. Starring Thandiwe Netwon in what looked like a contest of wits in the middle of nowhere Montana, the trailer look promising. At first glance, seeing a Black woman college professor dealing with some rural white hunters would seem to conjure up some basic plot elements, but Newton is a very talented actor, and this movie was being set up as a showcase for her talents.
Basically, it was another case where I figured I better act fast if I wanted to see it in theaters.
The movie opens with Sandra Guidry (Newton) attending to her mother’s cremation. While the audience is never told explicitly what the older woman died of, there are hints that it was a long illness. In the meantime, Sandra has a home in the form of a remote mountain cabin in the middle of a Montana canyon, a dog, and a job teaching speech at a local university. Then one day she finds a red truck parked on her property. It’s not even ambiguous: the truck is in her driveway and her house is visible from the parked vehicle. She leaves a note asking the driver not to park there again, only to find the note crumpled up and bloody next to a dead bird when she gets home. From there, things escalate.
Escalation is the name of the game here. Local law enforcement comes in the form of a single deputy (Gus Wolf), and he warns against doing much of anything that might make things worse between Sandra and the two hunters (Joris Jarsky and Jefferson White) while making it clear he really can’t do much of anything. The two men, brothers, take very different reactions to Sandra’s request, one wary and put-upon but at least a little courteous, and the other just rude and threatening. Sandra, however, is a person who does not believe in letting little things slide any more than the two hunters do, so it’s only a matter of time before things get much worse.
First off, this was a fantastic movie. Newton is a powerhouse in the role, and the rest of the cast is fine. However, I knew Newton was probably going to be good. It’s where the movie’s plot goes that I really appreciated it. A lot of movies like this would have made Sandra an idealistic newcomer. That is not the case. She has been living in the area for a while, and she more or less understands how things are supposed to work. The movie also doesn’t paint her as a complete saint. Some of the actions she takes are clearly only going to make things worse, but the thing is she is trying to prove a point, one where society has some shared rules, knowing full well that plenty of people operate under their own.
It is worth knowing that the movie does have a racial theme running through it, but there’s more than that. The first images are a photographic slide show of settlers moving into the area and trying to tame the land as their own. There’s more than a hint here that there are men who go through life without fear of retribution, with just a smidgen of Manifest Destiny involved. It’s probably not a coincidence that the only People of Color in the movie are both women in the form of Sandra and a Native America TA played by Tanaya Beatty. Meanwhile, Sandra and the hunters are not only of different races, but also genders, education, childhoods, and economic background. Despite that, there is still a moment where she and one of the hunters have an almost civilized conversation on what they have in common. Most of the major characters are far more complicated than they might first appear to be, and the violence that occurs always happens off-screen. As it is, the idea is that neither Sandra nor the hunters can do much of anything without escalating things, making it only certain that there is only one way that this is all going to end. The only question is how much blood will there be or whether someone can pull the brakes before it’s too late.
Grade: A
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