At its best, Robin Wright’s Land is a chilling update on a recent trend of films and books about the efforts to find oneself by giving up the comforts of modernity to return to nature. It begins with Edee (Wright) sitting in a high-rise apartment talking to her sister, Emma (Kim Dickens). Their tone is civil but distanced, and the apartment is shot with such cold color-grading and uncomfortable blocking that it resembles an office space more than someone’s home. Abruptly, the film cuts to Edee driving an SUV with a U-Haul trailer out of the city and further into the countryside, winding up narrow mountain roads as helicopter shots take in how remote her location is becoming. We learn that Edee has bought a cabin high up a mountain and far from anyone else. Upon arriving, she asks the realtor who led her to the house to arrange to have someone come take not just her trailer but her rental vehicle, intending to live in isolation. The local man nervously mentions the dangers of having no means of getting back down the mountain, but Edee is so barely able to tolerate human interaction that she can only wave him off as she flees into her new domicile.
The second the door closes behind Edee, it is obvious that this is no mere retreat or getaway but something altogether more desperate. The cabin is a rundown relic with no running water or electricity, and the visible holes between the hand-cut logs pockmark the walls like Chekhov’s buckshot portending issues when winter hits. Before leaving, the realtor asked if she’d ever lived in circumstances like this, and it comes as little surprise that she says no. Interspersed flashbacks alluding to some kind of tragedy and lingering survivor’s guilt quickly clarify things: Edee has not come out here to reset but simply to get away permanently, and though she will later deny that this is a convoluted attempt at suicide, it is obvious that she neither intends to go back from this new life nor spend much time living it.
Wright wastes little time in showing Edee’s minimal planning going to hell. A wandering bear costs her what little food stores she brought with her, and worsening weather thwarts her already hapless attempts at hunting and gathering. Soon, Edee’s skin turns a seemingly permanent shade of blue, and as the firewood dwindles and her energy fades from hunger and cold, the world compresses around the woman as she suffers snow blindness outdoors and claustrophobia in her small, uninsulated home. Within a few minutes, Wright raises the stakes in ways that movies in this vein don’t often do anymore.
But because the director so quickly arrives at the logical endpoint of Edee’s desire to flee any human contact to outpace her own sense of loss, Land has nowhere to go but up, which it does in predictably ham-fisted fashion. In a deus ex machina moment of salvation, a local hunter, Miguel (Demián Bichir), saves Edee right at the moment that she is about to succumb to hypothermia, and begins to nurse her back to health. From here, everything adheres to formula. Edee protests being helped while meekly surrendering to his aid, which ranges from immediate heat and food to long-term lessons in hunting. Miguel’s selflessness gradually reveals itself to be a reaction to his own trauma, and the two eventually form a close friendship as they open up to each other. The unexpected turns of the film’s early stretch make this progression all the more tedious, and even the direction gets duller, swapping out the compelling sense of dread that set into Edee’s new living conditions for an endless series of sweeping vistas in autumnal colors, sunlight delicately bronzing her surroundings as she gets a new lease on life.
The more complex grappling with pain and the ambiguity whether Edee wants to live alone or simply die fades away, leaving the remainder of the film to play out as a generic feel-good tale with just enough pessimism to make the first half-hour not feel like a bait-and-switch. Indeed, only the good taste to keep Edee and Miguel’s relationship respectfully platonic prevents this from veering into TV movie sap. It’s a frustrating arc for what began as a promising directorial debut, responding to the hardness of life (a topic arguably at its apex of universal resonance at the moment) and taking all the easy ways out.
The post Land appeared first on Spectrum Culture.