Sundance Review: 'Land' Stares Void-lessly at Grief
In the wake of tragedy, Edee (Robin Wright) heads into isolation. With a rental car and a U-Haul trailer full of supplies, she heads to the Wyoming wilderness with nothing but herself and her wits. No neighboring plots of land. No cell phone to make contact with the outside world. Not even the car she rode in on stays — reluctantly returned at her behest by the realtor who sold Edee her new plot of land. We all grieve in our own ways, but removing herself from a life of resurfacing trauma is how Edee wants to try and renew life.
So is the premise for Land. In its pitch, the film sounds similar to 2014’s Wild — someone with grief heads into nature where their trauma is reckoned with by literal and figurative survival for life itself — but truthfully, the conventional plotting of Land tracks with most archetypes of cinematic grief. Such similarities can be forgiven. Not every narrative is unique, but if the derivative can execute, even partially, then it can carve out a space for itself. Unfortunately, Land’s tool set isn’t sharp enough to do so.
Land could very well be a ‘Travel Wyoming’ infomercial with how much undue emphasis is placed on nature — though it should be noted that this film was shot in Alberta, Canada, so maybe ‘Travel Canada’ is called for instead. It’s not uncommon for a film to give its location a sense of place, but there is a stark disconnect between the film’s themes, finding new reason to live, and its setting, which is positioned as this natural bastion of life and beauty. There is a disproportionate allotment to the latter, which is a problem when the former is conveyed on the backs of particularly stiff moments of characterization.
Dialog driven scenes are sparse — perhaps normal for a film with a single person in the wilderness — and swaths of the film just show Edee surviving in the outdoors. She hunts, she fishes, she chops wood, but none are so vapid and meaningless as the long, pensive gazes into the “Wyoming” wilderness that pervade the film. In these instances, we are supposed to trace Edee’s growth — the better she is able to survive on her own, the closer she can overcome here grief and connect with others— but the visual image so is stripped bare of meaning that every act feels airless, a tiresome affair even at 89 minutes.
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Cinema As We Know It’s Sundance 2021 Coverage
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