Land: Movie Review

Cast: Robin Wright, Demian Bichir

Director: Robin Wright

It may be quiet and reflective in its opening salvos, but Robin Wright's Land is more an internalised film about the crippling effect of grief and the desire to get away from it all.

Wright plays Edee, a woman who has suffered an unspeakable trauma, and has decided to go live life off the grid in the hills of Wyoming. Unfortunately, despite stocking up on plenty of food, and selling off most of her old life, Edee's wildly unprepared for the harsh reality of what lies ahead.

From crippling cold to a bear attack while she's stuck in her own outhouse, the elements are too cruel to tolerate, pushing her to the brink of death. But she's found in the nick of time by Miguel (a rugged, bearded Demian Bichir, whose performance is soulful and melancholy).

Nursed back to life, Edee finds her desire to not be around people is gradually being challenged....

Land does a uniformly good job of creating atmosphere, whether it's via Wright's solid use of vistas and framing, or the use of brief flashbacks here and there, dalliances of memories past and moments lost.

However, the film's desire to provide an exposition-heavy scene towards the end feels forced, with reasoning coming tumbling out when in truth, it never really felt needed or earned.

It derails much of what Land manages to do early on, making the seemingly unapproachable Edee more grounded in her reality, but ultimately feeling more hollow in her loss. It's a strange feeling to convey and watch on the screen, but the film's emotional heft is lost by the garbled speed in which it finds itself wrapped at the end.

The meat of the story is in the earlier part of the movie, as Wright's Edee battles the elements, and the life she's chosen as she decides to be hermetic. It's here the film has the heft, rather than when the bon mots of Miguel's ethos ("You were on my way" he intones when asked why he saved her - a troublesome element of the film that a male saviour has to be on hold for a woman in desperation) come falling out.

Ultimately, Land squanders its more interesting questions in pursuit of a more reflective piece that for the large part works - it's just that when it chooses to answer the questions it doesn't need to it falls flat and disengages the viewer - no matter what hard work Wright has put in behind, and in front of, the camera.