In this simmering thriller, Thandiwe Newton plays a professor in rural Montana who confronts two hunters who say they’re just passing through.
A woman alone is seldom left alone, especially if she’s young and pretty and content in her solitude. The world presses in no matter how she resists its intrusions; strangers demand her attention, her smiles and time. The sexual connotations are unmistakable and complicated, and they’re intensified when race enters the picture, as it does in the simmering thriller “God’s Country,” a story about a woman who wants to be left in peace and isn’t.
It’s clear from the start that Sandra (Thandiwe Newton) likes keeping the world at bay; it’s evident just in the location of her house in rural Montana. A neat-as-a-pin structure with large windows that give her great views, though not much privacy at night, the house is ringed by trees and perched against a majestic mountain range. It’s an idyllic location, far enough from the neighbors — one of her colleagues lives within view — but also near enough to town and to the small college where she teaches.
It’s a good life or seems to be, although Sandra’s mother, who lived with her, has recently died. Now Sandra just lives with her dog. She is still very much in mourning — melancholy seems to have settled on her like a heavy blanket, giving her an ineffable sadness that Newton conveys with expressive subtlety — but she seems otherwise OK. She takes runs with her dog, chops wood, goes to work and suffers through meetings without rolling her eyes (too much). She has few friends, really colleagues, but she engages with other people and, you grasp at once, she engages them on her own terms.
Her sovereignty is tested when a red pickup truck abruptly appears parked on her property within view of her front windows. She leaves a polite note on the truck, but the pickup continues to materialize, a bright, ugly portent of trouble that soon intensifies. The truck’s owners, two scowling brothers, Nathan and Samuel (Joris Jarsky and Jefferson White), like to hunt in the area and don’t care whose land they trample through. Things escalate quickly. Soon, Sandra and the brothers are squaring off on her property. “I’ve heard about you,” Samuel tells her, moving toward her as Nathan holds him back.
The movie is based on James Lee Burke’s “Winter Light,” a terse, moody short story that’s an atmospheric, interestingly ambiguous meditation on masculinity and ethics that turns into a war of self-annihilating will. In adapting the story, the filmmakers — it was directed by Julian Higgins, who wrote the script with Shaye Ogbonna — have made significant changes, notably to the protagonist, who is a white man in the original. They’ve also given Sandra a cumbersome back story that’s meant to illuminate her character and say something about race, but only weighs her down.
Higgins has a feel for the poetry of the landscape, and he and his cinematographer, Andrew Wheeler, make effective use of the region’s majestic, sometimes eerie beauty. It’s winter when the story opens and snow blankets the area, creating a soothing hush that can also seem ominous. When Sandra goes running with her dog, her solitude looks inviting yet is foreboding, and not simply because the dog scarcely looks capable of taking down a predator. This country, you know, doesn’t belong only to God.
The movie works best when it doesn’t over-explain and instead lets the land and the characters, the wide open spaces and the performances — especially Newton’s meticulously controlled turn — speak for themselves. In the original story, Burke writes of one of the trespassers, “He smiled while he talked, but his eyes did not go with his face.” Newton and some of the other actors (notably Jarksy and Jeremy Bobb as an ineffectual lawman) catch the subtleties of violence in that sentence admirably well. You don’t need to hear the threat to know the violence will soon come.
God’s Country
Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
