Even before the action takes place, the landscape in 2022’s God’s Country sets a desolate, bleak tone. Western Montana is portrayed as a vast, isolated land, and it creates an unsettling atmosphere for audiences before the action kicks off.
But then the action kicks off, drawing audiences in even more.
The film is based on the short story “Winter’s Light” by James Lee Burke. Thandiwe Newton plays university professor Sandra Guidry. Reeling after the loss of her mother, Sandra soon finds herself at the mercy of two hunters Nathan and Samuel (Boris Jarsky and Yellowstone’s Jefferson White). The two trespassed on her property. She asks them to leave. They refuse. This feud continues to escalate, and is, in every scene, on the verge of exploding into full-fledged violence.
This dispute over territory drives most of the film’s action, but Newton, who’s in every scene of the film, carries the overall production with a simmering gravitas that almost bleeds out of the celluloid. A black woman in Montana, she already feels as if she doesn’t belong before her encounters with Samuel and Nathan. Institutions like the police force and her own university cannot provide solace. Toxic masculinity also appears as the film explores the hunters and what makes them act the way they do. It is a sometimes uneasy but extremely profound film, and one of 2022’s unsung gems. The film would work well on public or academic library shelves for those studying race in cinema, as well as those interested in the Western genre.