Simran Hans 

Land review – Robin Wright goes mild in the country

The actor’s directorial debut follows a woman through grief and back to life, but doesn’t go deep
  
  

Robin Wright in Land.
‘Sympathetic and believable’: Robin Wright in Land. Photograph: Daniel Power/AP

Edee (Robin Wright, who also directs) ditches her phone, abandons her car, and isolates herself in a remote cabin in Wyoming, attempting to bury her grief in the mountains. Except she’s woefully unprepared, unable to chop wood or read a compass, never mind catch and kill her own food. “This isn’t working,” she screams in frustration, and so the film wisely changes tack halfway through, shifting from survivalist drama into melodrama. Edee is rescued by Miguel (Demián Bichir), a handsome man in a cowboy hat who gently brings her back to life with quiet companionship, hunting lessons, and Tears for Fears karaoke.

“Only a person who has never been hungry would think starving is a way to die,” says Miguel, gently prodding at Edee’s privilege (and putting the film in conversation with others in which educated, unhappy white people pursue minimalist living – think Nomadland, Wild, Into the Wild). Wright is sympathetic and believable, but we never truly get a sense of Edee or her desires outside the bounds of her loss.

Watch a trailer for Land.
 

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