Land | Little White Lies

Land

04 Jun 2021 / Released: 04 Jun 2021

A person wearing a beige top sits in a forest, surrounded by pine trees.
A person wearing a beige top sits in a forest, surrounded by pine trees.
3

Anticipation.

Robin Wright’s first stint behind the camera should be interesting.

3

Enjoyment.

Pretty slight, but Wright and Bichir are good value.

3

In Retrospect.

Its thematic intentions outweigh its technical shortcomings.

Robin Wright directs and stars in this affect­ing if slight por­trait of a woman attempt­ing to escape her grief.

In recent years there has been a raft of films about peo­ple liv­ing off-grid, from Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace to Matt Ross’ Cap­tain Fan­tas­tic. But what’s behind this trend?

Is it sim­ply a desire to get back to nature? It cer­tain­ly seems as though more and more of us are crav­ing authen­tic, real-world expe­ri­ences in these increas­ing­ly digi­tised times – a feel­ing no doubt cal­ci­fied by the Covid pan­dem­ic. In the case of Land, though, it’s a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed than that.

Like those afore­men­tioned films, Robin Wright’s first fea­ture as a direc­tor is in essence a sur­vival sto­ry. Yet the jour­ney our pro­tag­o­nist goes on is moti­vat­ed by a trag­ic loss. Wright plays Edee, a recent­ly bereaved woman who can no longer stand to be around peo­ple and so decides to eke out a her­met­ic exis­tence in rur­al Wyoming.

Giv­en that she can bare­ly man­age to chop wood, let alone hunt for the food she’ll need to see her through the harsh win­ter months, all signs point to this being a fool­hardy endeav­our. When a bear ran­sacks her cab­in, destroy­ing her lim­it­ed sup­plies, Edee’s sit­u­a­tion becomes even more grave.

Enter Edee’s guardian angel, a kind­ly local hunter (played by Demián Bichir) who inter­venes when she is at her low­est ebb. As the sea­sons change the pair form a close bond and Edee grad­u­al­ly comes to realise that life is worth liv­ing after all. Maybe there’s even some beau­ty left in this cru­el world.

This must be the place for it; even though the film occa­sion­al­ly has the look of an over­ly-pol­ished TV dra­ma, the panoram­ic splen­dour of its pri­ma­ry locale (it was actu­al­ly shot on loca­tion in Alber­ta, Cana­da) is tru­ly awe-inspiring.

A few minor tech­ni­cal gripes aside, this is an accom­plished debut from Wright, and her and Bicher’s unde­ni­able star qual­i­ty ele­vates the rather thin material.

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