114 min | PG-13 | January 22, 2021 | IFC Films
A retired Texas rancher and his son are mending a fence along the Rio Grande when a panicked night goes wrong and a boy ends up dead. Jackson runs south into the country he was raised to fear. The movie wants to atone for a sin it cannot stop committing.
No Man’s Land is a modern Western about a white teenager who kills a Mexican boy on the border and flees into Mexico to find absolution. Jackson Greer is a baseball prospect with a way out of the family ranch. One violent night closes that door. He rides south not to escape the law but to confront the father of the boy he killed. The film presents itself as a story about the people who live on both sides of the river, but it is really a story about a white kid earning forgiveness, and it cannot reconcile those two things.
Frank Grillo plays Bill Greer as a hard rancher who covers for his son and watches his family come apart. Grillo gives the father a clenched physical stillness that suggests a man who solves problems with force and has run out of problems force can solve. Jake Allyn plays Jackson with earnest open-faced guilt, and the performance asks the audience to ride along with his pain rather than the pain he caused. George López plays Ramirez, the Texas Ranger working the case, with a weariness that the script never develops. Jorge A. Jimenez plays Gustavo, the grieving father, and he carries more genuine grief in a few scenes than the protagonist manages across the whole film. Andie MacDowell plays Monica Greer, the mother, and gets little to do but wait at home.
Conor Allyn directs from a script by Jake Allyn and David Barraza, and the camera loves the landscape more than it understands the people moving through it. The Mexican countryside is shot in warm golden light that turns a story about death into a travelogue. The editing favors long romantic vistas over the tension of a fugitive being hunted, which drains the chase of urgency. The score swells toward redemption at the exact moments the story has not earned it. Every craft choice points the audience toward Jackson’s salvation rather than the consequences of his crime.
The film means well and that is the problem. It wants to humanize the people on the southern side of the border and then hands the entire emotional arc to the boy who killed one of them. Gustavo and Ramirez exist to teach Jackson something about himself. The Mexican characters become scenery in a movie that claims to center them. No Man’s Land sets out to cross a line and tell a story from the other side, then turns around and walks home.