Film Review: "God's Country"

The new film stars Thandiwe Newton as a woman trying to make a life for herself in the unforgiving American West.

I’ve always wanted to visit Montana. Every time I see a film or television series set (and filmed) there, I’m struck by its simply gorgeous majesty, the way the mountains seem to rear up so high they might touch the sky, the way the plains stretch out as far as the eye can see. Maybe it’s because I’m from Appalachia and the mountains are in my blood, but there’s just something about its beauty that calls to some deep part of me. Like so many of the most beautiful parts of the country, however, there’s a darkness brewing in Red America, and it’s very much on display in God’s Country, the new film from Julian Higgins.

When the film begins, Thandiwe Newton’s Sandra Guidry is a Black woman teaching in one of the Whitest states in the country. When she discovers that a pair of hunters have trespassed on her property, she leaves them a note kindly but firmly asking them to cease doing so. Very quickly, however, it becomes clear that there is something far more sinister at work. After towing their truck, they shoot an arrow into her door and, unsurprisingly, matters begin to escalate very quickly. This is, after all, the West, and everyone is a law unto themselves. 

God’s Country does a very good job at showing how Sandra’s life as a Black woman in a state like Montana is a difficult one. Her colleagues at the local university pay lip service to wanting to diversify their department…and then end up hiring the same kind of candidates they always have, replicating the very systems of power that were in place before. Her one ally on the hiring committee, a White woman, is clearly so beaten down by her own struggles against this system that the best she can do is to second Sandra’s request that they seek out diversity. As will prove to be the case with the hunters, the men of the world move through it with a sense of entitlement and impunity, and they truly don’t care what women like Sandra have to say about it.

As matters continue to escalate, it becomes clear that, in the American West, there is only one way out of such situations: violence. Local law enforcement is nearly powerless to help. Not only does the sheriff discourage Sandra from pursuing the matter–offering up a mealy-mouthed excuse as to why she should be the one to de-escalate the situation–but he ultimately shows himself utterly incapable when it comes to an actual confrontation with the men of the town. They are, it turns out, just as hostile to law enforcement writ large as they are to the Black woman in their midst. During one of the film’s tensest moments, Sandra actually does manage to prevent a bit of violence, but it’s a temporary reprieve. There are things set in motion that cannot be stopped.

However, it’s not as if she doesn’t make at least some efforts to reach a peace with the hunters. In fact, after she follows one of them to a church where his mother is the organist, the two share a surprisingly heartfelt  Though they seem to share a bit of a bond, he ultimately spurns her effort at reconciliation and his brother is, if anything, even more pathologically averse to conflict resolution, his eyes burning with an unmistakable hatred for this Black woman who has dared to not only make her home here, but also to speak back to those who would violate her geographic autonomy. 

There is a tenseness to this film that makes its climax–filled with fire and blood–feel inevitable, even as we, as viewers, hope that there can be some rapprochement, some cessation of hostilities or, at the very least, a truce or ceasefire. The silences are filled with menace and we, along with Sandra, struggle with our sense of powerlessness as a relatively insignificant matter becomes a synecdoche for the wider problems afflicting America. Could Sandra have given in? Yes, of course but, as someone who has had to fight every day of her life, and who had to watch as her people were abandoned in the dark waters of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, she’s tired of always rolling over. Can we really blame her if she doesn’t want people trespassing on her property?

In that sense, God’s Country is something of the inverse of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was something of a paean to Trump’s America. The American West remains a dark and violent and turbulent place, one where a simple trespass can turn into a blazing inferno, and the film forces us to confront this ugly, brutal, visceral reality, not to turn away from it. It also demands that we acknowledge our own complicity in this phenomenon. Small wonder, then, that so many users at the Internet Movie Database have taken time out of their day to unload on it, accusing it of being everything from liberal propaganda to a terrible film (or both). One can’t help but wonder whether they would have a very different attitude toward the film, and toward Sandra, if she were a man defending her property and rights ( as was the case in the original story on which the film is based). I don’t think the answer is far to find.

For those able to look at the film with a more unbiased eye, however, the rewards are tremendous. It’s the type of film designed to make you uncomfortable, to make you marvel at the beauty and the ugliness that is at the heart of the American landscape, both geographical and cultural. Like Sandra, we all bear the scars of our past lives and, as with Sandra, we have to make the choice about what we are going to do with the ugly realities that we confront in the world around us.

God’s Country refuses to give us the easy solutions that we so often expect from Hollywood cinema, and it is particularly searing in the way it turns the conventions of the western on their head. In the end, Sandra’s victory over her tormenters is a pyrrhic one. The American West remains as unforgiving as ever.

Grade: A