Hands That Bind

"Hands That Bind" is the type of a film that can grab your attention but can easily get lost in the shuffle of big-budget action/sci-fi blockbusters and comic book movies. But given the right push, this could become this year's "Nomad" or "Minari."

Led by the always formidable but criminally underrated Paul Sparks ("Broadwalk Empire" and "House of Cards"), Kyle Armstrong has created a film that perfectly captures the struggles of a hired hand in a farming community in '80s Alberta. The dialogue is straightforward and curt and most of the characters speak in clipped sentences but every word is carefully thought-out and well-spoken.

While Paul is undeniably the driver of the film, the rest of the cast equally deserve accolades. Susan Kent, for one, is a revelation here if you've seen her only do comedy. Meanwhile, Landon Liboiron, known for the teen soap "Degrassi," proves he's becoming one of the most interesting actors of his generation. With his handsome features, he can easily fit in a slew of Netflix run-of-the-mill rom-coms or one of those Lifetime holiday movies, but it's obvious he'd rather not.

There's a dialogue exchange early on between him and Paul that plays like a pissing contest and to less capable actors, it wouldn't have much of an impact and would have been completely forgettable.

But with actors of their strength, the scene was intense without the use of big words or any need for a shouting match (I hope Aaron Sorkin is taking notes).

I've read the other reviews of The Hands That Bind, and I wonder if those reviewers saw the same movie I did. All of them talk about the characters ("nuanced"), the pacing ("slow burn"), and the cinematography ("stunning") in pretty much the same way, which is true enough, but none mentions the paranormal subplot, which I found most intriguing albeit frustratingly, probably deliberately, underdeveloped and unresolved. The film's gothic elements -- strange lights in the sky, mutilated cattle, weird noises, a mysterious black sedan, and brief episodes of violent illness -- are sprinkled here and there throughout, but if they're noticed at all by the characters, which sometimes they are not, they're met with little more than a puzzled shrug and given nary a second thought. These spooky occurrences have no obvious raison d'etre, no effect or motivating influence on the characters' actions, and no connection to the film's main story, which would be entirely unchanged as far as I could tell if they were eliminated altogether. It's as if some scenes from a sci-fi movie (e.g., The X-Files) somehow got spliced into this one due to a mix-up during final editing. Yet the effect on the viewer (at least on me) is to keep the question of what-the-heck-is-going-on-here? Front and center throughout the entire movie. Alas, that question is never answered or even hinted at. In the end, it's just a movie about a proud, soft-spoken man trying to make a living down on the farm and do right by his family in tough economic times.

Armstrong's gone and made a *movie* movie, which happens to be Letterkenny as written by Philip K Dick. It's as scattershot and prone to whiplash as that comparison implies, but it is all bound by Armstrong's intense commitment to his deeply felt anxieties and singularly honed visual sense, as well as incredibly sensitive performances all around from an exceptionally chosen cast (all anchored by Paul Sparks' fierce and nuanced central depiction of repression and paranoia). The film succeeds as an exceptional character portrait of a man trapped in the ideals of a bygone era, with evocative techniques ranging from abstracted genre iconography to visual metaphors to communicate this struggle in a way that is truly invigorating to witness.

It continues in the vein of Armstrong's prior feature in emphasizing emotional sense over the tenets of a conventional narrative, but for conscious viewers in search of something authentically fresh with earned emotional resonance, I implore that this is a film not to be missed.