By Jeffrey Pike
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Nathan Morlando
Starring: Bill Paxton | Colm Feore | Joe Cobden | Josh Wiggins | Sophie Nélisse
Country: united_states
Year: 2017
Running time: 108
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5160928/?ref_=nv_sr_3
Jeffrey says: “A tidy, well-wrought, low-budget thriller, with some of the spirit of both LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and ANIMAL KINGDOM, it earns its thrills the hard way, by slowly building tension to nearly intolerable levels, rather than spilling gore across the screen, as movies of this genre frequently resort to.
“Farm boy, Jonas (Josh Wiggins), heads to the woods to release a venomous snake his father would rather he had just killed. There he meets Casey Caraway, his new neighbor, come to retrieve her dog. She talks to him, treating him more or less like a real person, and he is immediately smitten. His goofy, big-toothed grin lets us know this is anew experience for him, and he’s totally in love with it. He starts spending time with her, over the objections of his father (Joe Cobden),the last farmer on the land, trying to keep a hardscrabble existence together while caring for his bipolar wife. They’d taken Jonas out of school to help on the farm.
“By spending time with Casey, Jonas inevitably runs up against Casey’s nightmarish father, Wayne (Bill Paxton), a local cop who only recently joined the force under suspicious circumstances. After Wayne attacks him, Jonas tries to find help, but the police close ranks behind one of their own and his father berates him for provoking a cop. Only he can get him and Casey out of this mess, so when an opportunity presents itself, he goes on the lam with her and a bag of stolen drug money,knowing Wayne will be after them.
“One of the pleasures in watching comes from noticing the care with which the cinematography was put together. Filmed around Sault St.Marie in Ontario, apparently during the fall, it skews heavily towards that autumnal palette, all russets and yellows and oranges and browns,and it uses the landscape well, with long shots across the broad countryside and two tiny characters fleeing across it, reminding us that the whole world is against them. And it gets fine support from an elegiac, ambient soundtrack by Son Lux.
“It’s a laconic movie with few words and, even on the run, moments that are nearly serene, so that you get a feel not only for the circumstances, but also for the land on which they occur and the lives of the people who live them. As such it maybe slips the bonds of its genre and almost becomes social commentary. Before yet again rendering you earthbound with a finely honed sequence of pure terror. 4 cats“