In one of the final scenes in writer/director Morrisa Maltz’s debut feature, “The Unknown Country,” the camera tracks the shadow of a moving car, following it as it bends around rocks and trees, constantly moving forward in its anonymity. It’s an apt visual metaphor for this lyrical film, as Lily Gladstone (playing Tana, though her name is barely spoken in the film) traverses through the country, driving towards some unspoken conclusion. Blending actors and real-life figures, ‘Country’ is a road-trip movie interested in the forgotten pockets of middle America. As Gladstone’s Tana moves from town to town, diner to diner, she encounters an eclectic mix of locals, who often give their stories in voice-over.
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It’s a fascinating hybrid approach that almost directly calls attention to the intermixing of fact and fiction, but it nevertheless works wonders, as Gladstone’s expressive face and reactions anchor this contemplative journey. What plot there is revolves around Tana’s drive to Texas to reckon with the death of a family member, recreating a journey that her grandmother took decades prior.
First, however, Tana drives from Minnesota to South Dakota to visit her Oglala Lakota family and attend her cousin’s wedding (played by Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, also a producer). There, she reconnects with her roots and visits the reservation, where another encounter with a family friend (Richard Ray Whitman) helps her to make sense of her family and lineage.
From there, she continues driving toward Texas, meeting several e characters along the way. By design, the film is made up of a series of vignettes, including a prolonged one in Dallas, where she falls in with a group of 30-somethings for a night out that could be its own film and is beautiful in its portrait of the possibilities that meeting strangers can hold. The film also shows the dark side of traveling, including interludes where Tana is preyed upon by locals and a chilling scene where she wonders whether a sketchy man in a pickup is following her.
Aided by Andrew Hajek’s luminous cinematography, Tana’s journey begins in frigid winter before slowly moving towards spring the closer she gets. This isn’t a film interested in giving Tana too much backstory and often relies on the landscape and weather to tell us about her interior state. Yet Gladstone is phenomenal — not surprising to anyone who’s seen “Certain Women.” With a story by credit on the film, it’s evident that the character was created in collaboration, and even though she’s mainly asked to listen, she nevertheless makes these scenes compelling, telling us just enough about her character and motivations while remaining something of a cipher.
However, a few scenes feel like they belong in a lesser film, including an overlay of a radio news program that introduces Trump into the movie in a way that grates against the timeless feel of everything else. Another includes a possible love interest in Dallas, played by Raymond Lee, that flirts with cliche before pulling back.
Even with these, Gladstone manages to sell every emotion, moving from despair to wonder as the journey continues. By the time she reaches her destination, the reason is almost beside the point. Maltz maintains the lo-fi approach, shunning major revelations for quiet moments where Tana is forced to reckon with the end of a journey and what she should do next.
Maltz began the project in 2016, letting the film organically grow over the course of those years. One hopes that she doesn’t take so much time between projects in the future because “The Unknown Country” is a remarkable debut and announces Maltz as a major new voice in independent film [A-]
