89 min | PG-13 | February 12, 2021 | Focus Features
A woman loses everything and flees to a Wyoming mountain to live alone with no electricity, no phone, and no plan to survive the winter. A stranger finds her near death and refuses to let her die. Grief gets a postcard backdrop.
Edee Holzer abandons her life and moves into a derelict cabin in the Wyoming wilderness. She brings no survival skills and no intention of ever coming back down the mountain. A hunter named Miguel finds her starving and frozen and drags her back from the edge. The film tracks her slow, reluctant return to the world through the relationship that forms between them. This is a story about grief that wants to disappear into a landscape and the person who refuses to let it.
Robin Wright plays Edee with a clenched, withholding stillness that keeps her loss offscreen for most of the runtime. She lets the body do the acting. Edee fumbles an axe, vomits from bad water, and shivers through a winter she did not prepare for. Demián Bichir plays Miguel with a warmth that never tips into sentiment, and he carries his own buried grief without announcing it. The two-hander between them gives the film its only real pulse. Kim Dickens appears briefly as Edee’s sister Emma and supplies the human tether Edee is trying to cut.
Wright directs her first feature and shoots much of it in long, patient takes that strand Edee inside enormous frames of rock and snow. The cinematography keeps her small against the mountain, which is the point and also the limit. The script by Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam withholds the details of Edee’s loss and then delivers them in a single late conversation that explains more than it earns. Wright trusts silence and weather to do the emotional work. The approach is disciplined and austere, and it leaves the back half feeling thin where it should feel devastating.
Land is a competent, sincere film that mistakes restraint for depth. The wilderness photography is striking and the central pairing is genuine. The problem is the script, which builds toward a revelation that any viewer can see coming from the first frame. Wright the actor commits fully and Wright the director shows real control of tone and image. The film just never finds anything to say about grief that the mountain has not already said better by sitting there.