THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY - Mark Reviews Movies

The Unknown Country, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 27, 2023

It's a rare feat when an actor can truly carry a movie, but such is the case with Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country. The movie tells the mostly aimless story of a young woman on a long road trip with multiple routine and a few vital stops along the way. That's it, really, and writer/director Morrisa Maltz seems to realize just how little narrative there actually is here, if several moments of random characters, who are briefly encountered on the trip, telling their stories is any indication.

There's that, but then, there is Gladstone, whom Maltz often shoots in close-ups of various levels of extremity. At times, we see her whole face, and at others, only her mouth or eyes might be taking up the entirety of the screen. Every shot of her, though, communicates so much in terms of the character's loneliness and trying to find some sort of meaning after a tragic loss, as well as almost a lifetime away from her home and most of her family.

Gladstone's Tana is lost and searching, and since much of Maltz's screenplay keeps the character at a distance, it's the actor who has to bring all of that, as well as much more, to the forefront. If the character and story were more developed than the barely barebones narrative that's actually here, the movie could have been something special.

Instead, it's a showcase for Gladstone, whose Tana is invited from Minneapolis to a cousin's wedding at a Lakota reservation. She hasn't seen or much talked to members of her family there in a couple decades, and some loaded shots of Tana caressing a blanket with a walker in the backdrop of an empty bedroom point to some significant loss in her life recently. She reluctantly accepts the invitation, and thus begins a long trek across the Midwest and ultimately south, toward a place where she hopes she'll find a connection with her closest family member and the past.

The whole point here is that everyone, from members of the family to some assorted working-class people Tana meets on her trip, has a story. At times, Tana's story—the little there is of it, to be clear—stops, and the voice of a waitress, the owner/manager of one of the many motels on the road, or a gas station clerk will fill the soundtrack. There are glimpses of those lives, presumably told by real people playing themselves, before Tana is back on her way.

It's a generous act, to be sure, but as for the story that probably should matter the most here, Tana's remains in the backdrop of the trip, only revealed to any basic extent in the third act of The Unknown Country. We stick with her as much we can, though, because Gladstone so clearly presents some emotional truth of the character and her story, even if the movie itself seems to consider them a secondary concern too often.

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