Microaggressions

 

GOD'S COUNTRY (A-minus) - You would be hard-pressed to find a movie as meticulously crafted as "God's Country." Every interior scene is carefully constructed and framed, and Julian Higgins' camera creeps across the wintry Montana landscape with a jaundiced eye.

At the center is Thandiwe Newton, as Sandra, an aggrieved woman who teaches at a local college and has moved into the rural home of her dead mother to tend to the old lady's belongings. At the school, she is on a faculty search committee, and her push for even a token amount of diversity falls on deaf ears. Meantime, a couple of good ol' boys like to park on her house's property when they go hunting. She politely asks them not to do it, and that only incites them.

Sandra is no shrinking violet, and so when the jerks keep leaving their red truck on her land, she tows it away. Things escalate quickly from there. A kindly sheriff's deputy, Gus (Jeremy Bobb), tries to mediate, but his efforts are mostly ineffective. The various trespasses -- both rural and academic -- have a grinding effect on Sandra, who, we come to learn, has a reason to be skeptical of Gus and police officers in general. She also is a New Orleans transplant who is haunted by memories of Hurricane Katrina and, you could call it, a flood of disturbing memories. Newton's placid mask occasionally belies Sandra's disgust at just about every turn, a woman of color marginalized in a white (at times literally snow-white) world. 

Higgins wrote the film with Shaye Ogbonna (TV's "The Chi"), and the script is whipsmart, never quite going in a direction you think (or fear) it might go. (For much of the movie I was chanting to myself, "Please don't sleep with the deputy, please don't sleep with the deputy.") A possible rapprochement with one of the trespassers teases a possible Lifetime Channel breakthrough only to take a quick turn. Later, Sandra herself betrays a student just to make a point with the smarmy head of the faculty search committee.

Dread lurks around every corner. Even a shot of a pair of eggs boiling in a glass pan raises goosebumps. The cinematographer is Andrew Wheeler, who cut his teeth on pop music videos. A close-up shot of a photograph burning in a house fire is mesmerizing. Higgins made one previous feature, an obscure drama way back in 2004, but he has the confidence of an experienced auteur. He lets Newton carry the story along to a stunning conclusion that is experienced mostly off screen, only heard by the viewer, but no less shocking in its impact. 

"God's Country" is a moving, minor-key rumination on the steady buildup, year after year, of the slights and offenses endured by a strong but emotionally bruised woman. And on the big screen, it is a wonder.

BONUS TRACK

The trailer: