God’s Country
**Seen at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
If a writer puts too many threads into a narrative, chances are, at least one will pull loose, and unravel everything. Based on everything we see transpire in Julian Higgins’s thriller, at least two could have been removed- or maybe the third one could have been excised while the other two remain- and this could have been a wholly successful movie. That it remains compelling is a credit to Thandiwe Newton, although even she can only take this film so far.
Newton plays Sandra Guidry, a tenured professor at a small town university in Big Country. Her mother recently passed away, and that has brought up some complicated emotions for her. Add on top of that a debate at work about who the next head of her department, and an escalating battle with two hunters who aren’t respecting her boundaries, the stress is going to pile up.
I feel like there are two narratives going on in this- one is a thriller where Sandra is being harassed and in a mental duel with the hunters that, inevitably, will lead to violence, the other is a drama about a woman struggling with the complicated nature of her grief over her mother’s death. In the screenplay by Higgins and Shaye Ogbonna, the fundamental idea is to put Sandra against natural prejudices that exist in her current life, as well as tying it into the life her and her mother had in New Orleans. Unfortunately, none of it really meshes, and we’re basically left with an unfocused movie with too many ideas it wants to get across, and not enough reason for putting them together. That being said, Newton shines in the main role, even if it still left me feeling hollow by the end.
