Film Review: LAND (2021): A Quiet Meditation on Humanity Wrapped Up in a Survivalism Coat

Land Review

Land (2021) Film Review, a movie directed by and starring Robin Wright, and co-starring Demián Bichir, Sarah Dawn Pledge, Kim Dickens, Warren Christie, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, Brad Leland, Dave Trimble, Barb Mitchell, Valerie Planche, and Laura Yenga.

With a set-up like the survivalist genre that’s generally reserved for grandiose tales and horror-thriller fare, it’s a real surprise when something more small-scale and intimate arrives on the scene.

Such is the case with Robin Wright’s directorial debut Land, a story about substituting anguish with solitude and the struggles to achieve emotional peace.

Wright’s character, Edee, experiences a traumatic loss and leaves her big-city Chicago lifestyle for the Wyoming wilderness as a means to solitarily cope. The story is sparse, and co-writers Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam are light on the dialogue, but Wright lets that ambiguity speak for itself. In fact, beyond the introductory bits of exposition with her sister (Kim Dickens) and a Wyoming townie (Brad Leland), there’s barely any talking within Land’s first 30 minutes. Edee barely even talks to herself (though she is keen on muttering a few bits of self-doubt).

During these quiet moments, Wright exudes a subdued confidence with her direction. She lets the struggles present themselves without the need for descriptive comment. Wright’s editors Anne McCabe and Mikkel E.G. Nielsen help her along in this task, showcasing bits of Edee’s new lifestyle that seem momentarily insignificant yet add up to a poignant piece of fearful, frustrating, and even joyous struggle. McCabe and Nielsen also move these silent tracts along at such a clip wherein no moment feels lengthy nor indulgent, yet together they make Edee’s struggles feel endless and divorced of time itself.

This pacing never dissipates, even when dialogue is slowly reintroduced to the narrative. After Edee suffers a close call during a winter blizzard and is medicated back to life by hunter Miguel (Demián Bichir) and local nurse Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge), her life seems to go on as endlessly long as it did before … just with more talking (and still not that much of it). The only difference is that she now has the company of Miguel, who returns sporadically after her recovery to teach her to hunt, prepare game, grow crops – to literally survive in the wilderness.

Miguel is not just a teacher but also a point of reintegration for Edee, someone to help her learn how to interact with humanity once again. By the time Edee learns that she also realizes she’s been similarly helping Miguel, who experienced a tragedy of his own in his rather recent past.

While the nitpicker in me could decry the stilted awkwardness that the film’s multi-character scenes hold, it’s hard to do so when they never drag on to overstay their welcome. Wright herself seems aware of this, and appropriately keeps these scenes short and sweet so they don’t become overbearing.

Likewise, the cynic in me could question the construct of the Indigenous characters being relegated to supporting roles in service of a white woman’s arc of emotional revival, but the third-act reveal of Miguel’s own struggles evens that playing field. Edee may sarcastically admit to this when she observes how Miguel “gives, gives, gives” while she “takes, takes, takes” and he smirkingly agrees, but their joint revelation is rather that of humanity as a shared experience of both happiness and sorrow. Their interactions with each other and the friendship that develops, though seemingly one-sided from either particular side, is in fact a complex coping mechanism and support system for their separate forms of trauma.

In this way Land eschews the “human versus nature” confines of the survivalist conflict in lieu of a broader structure, tying humankind’s struggles with both society and themselves all together as one. It’s not just about fighting off cabin-wrecking bears and facing the deathly cold of winter, but rather coming to terms with the hardships in your past and learning to live with yourself in spite of it.

As per the film’s namesake, land is not just a “where” but also a “who” and a “why”, and Wright’s film tackles that spiritual interconnectedness with very adept results.

Rating: 7/10

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