God's Country

God's Country is a slow burn but quite an impressive debut feature from Julian Higgins, beautifully enhanced by cinematographer Andrew Wheeler. Thandiwe Newton is good in the lead role of college professor, Sandra, who faces not only the power of the Patriarchy in the workplace but the existential threat of violence living alone and isolated on her Montana property. When she pushes back against two brothers who feel they have the proprietary right to hunt on her property, she is set on a collision course with the local men. An ex-New Orleans police officer, she's no pushover but you will have to decide whether or not her final resort to violence is a justifiably measured response.

College professor Sandra (Thandiwe Newton) lives alone in the middle of nowhere Montana after losing her mother. Two local hunters keep trespassing on her property. The confrontations slowly build. She's struggling with an unevolved superior at work. The acting sheriff is limited help. The actual sheriff is on leave after shooting a local.

This movie is quiet. In a way, it's too quiet. Newton is doing good quiet with simmering rage. The tree farm confrontation is good tension. So is the invitation into the trailer home. There are moments and scenes with great tension. Mostly, the movie is way too quiet and the tension slips. It needs to build the tension, but Sandra doesn't change. It's a little flat.

I get it. You should stand for something rather than fall for anything. Still, this lady was really pushing the envelope by escalating everything. I mean she was really asking for it. She broke more laws than the aggressors. Ironically, her past job should have gave her insight and made her smarter about it. Honestly, I don't know what the moral of this story is. I feel she should have put up a fence or moved. Why would any single woman live in the most remote area knowing there are few law enforcement to provide protection.? She had to have known how risky this would be. I'm a guy and even I wouldn't feel comfortable living in the middle of nowhere alone. To top it off, she threw her only friend under the bus. This is like watching any vigilante movie where the bad guys were not as aggressive as the vigilante. I dunno....

I came in hoping for a good story, but left shaking my head at the many lost opportunities to make it one. If you like being preached at for an hour and 43 minutes, this may be the film for you.

Besides the incessant lecturing, the movie had the pacing of a 78 played on a 45 player, the villains were all caricatures of bad people, and the protagonist was a preachy, "I know better than you about everything because" kind of a person.

The most interesting part of this movie was when I dropped a Milk Dud between my legs and spent 10 minutes groping around trying to find it.

See this movie only if you hate yourself.

This movie is essentially an art house upsell of something like I Spit On Your Grave. About 30 or 40 minutes into it, when the professor meets one of the hunters in the little church and finds common ground with him (I won't spoil how) I thought the movie might turn into something redemptive for both of these characters. Nothing doing. Instead of such a turn, it devolves into stereotype and cliché, and exactly the end you could predict. You want Trump Country "deplorables" you got them. You want a clueless "woke" interloper, you got that. Yet in the end, all the issues are resolved with a shotgun, hardly any sort of politically correct finish. If the point of this movie is just an ironic play on the idea that God is nowhere to be found in that place, or in any of these people, the point is pretty overtly made. That doesn't mean it's bad or unwatchable. It's neither, but it's not gory enough to be a successful exploitation film, nor creative enough to be a true art film. It's nicely filmed and definitely conveys the damnation of its people and place through its cinematography, and while none of the main antagonist characters, as written, are deep, complex or unique, they are all well portrayed by the actors. A better example of something with a similar theme might be Wind River.