Submitted by the Williams Lake Film Club
The Williams Lake Film Club is excited to bring God’s Country - a chilling neo-western thriller - to the big screen on Thursday, Oct. 13th at the Paradise Cinemas in Williams Lake. Directed by Julian Higgins, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and was touted as one of the best films at the festival. It currently has a critical review rating of 88 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film is based on James Lee Burke’s terse and atmospheric short story, “Winter Light”, a smouldering exploration of masculinity and ethics, in which a feud between a rural white male homeowner and two local hunters spirals out of control. However, director Julian Higgins and co-script writer Shaye Ogbonna, took a significant departure from the original story by changing the protagonist to a black female professor named Sandra (played in a career best performance by Thandiwe Newton). Early on in the film, we learn that Sandra, who lives on an isolated property in an unnamed Montana town, and is a humanities professor at the local university, has recently lost her mother. She now currently lives alone with her dog. She is in grief, but appears to be getting by, and prefers her solitary lifestyle. When two hunters (played by Joris Jarsky and Jefferson White) who like to hunt in the area decide to park their truck on her property without her permission, it begins an embittered and ominous battle of wills that gradually threatens to escalate into a spectacle of violence.
The film is divided over the course of seven days, and each day the simmering tension increases. On the first day, Sandra leaves a note on their truck, and thinks little of the incident. But when the truck is parked there again the following day, she makes the decision to get it towed. We also begin to see the needling and pressing social issues that occur in Sandra’s job at the university, and we learn the backstory of how she came to live in Montana after surviving Hurricane Catrina in New Orleans. As the movie unfolds, and the narrative begins to contextualize Sandra’s actions, we are forced to consider what we would do in her situation.
The script is strong, and director Julian Higgins has a skill for capturing the lyrical essence of the landscape. Cinematographer Andrew Wheeler creates a charged sense of beauty and solitude in the majesty of the high mountains, big skies, deep valleys, green forests, and treeless crest lines, which adds to the ratcheting tension. Living in the Cariboo Chilcotin, this is a landscape full of the profound beauty and silent desolation that we can identify with. In addition to a lead performance by Thandiwe Newton, which is has been called her career best, she is supported by a strong supporting cast that includes Jeremy Bobb as the town’s lone police officer, and B.C.’s own Tanaya Beatty, who is a student of Sandra’s.
At its heart, Higgin’s has not created not just a tale of a simple battle of wills over territory, but a film that deeply questions what is at stake when reckoning with failing systems of power, history, justice, and what we owe to others in a civil society - it is these ethical questions that will keep you thinking about the film long after the final scene. As Brian Tallerico writes in his review for RogerEbert.com, this is a “[a] film that understands both form and content, merging the two in a story that feels less like a piece of suspenseful entertainment and more like a warning.”
God’s Country will be screened at Paradise Cinemas in Williams Lake on Thursday, October 13th. Rated PG. Tickets are $10. Buy your tickets in Advance at the Open Book to avoid disappointment. Remaining tickets will be sold in the cinema lobby prior to the screening. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and the show starts at 7:00 p.m. To hear about all upcoming Williams Lake Film Club screenings, email williamslakefilmclub@gmail.com.