God’s Country movie storyline. Based on a short story by acclaimed author James Lee Burke, God’s Country is a character-driven thriller set in the snowy wilderness of the American West. Thandiwe Newton plays Sandra Guidry, a Black professor living and working in a rural college town. She’s also grieving her recently-deceased mother, for whom she’d served as primary caretaker.
On the day of the burial, Sandra discovers a mysterious red truck parked in her driveway. She soon learns it belongs to a pair of local hunters seeking to enter the forest behind her house. Sandra turns them away politely but firmly –her experience tells her these are not the sort of men to welcome freely into her world. But they won’t take no for an answer, and soon Sandra finds herself drawn into an escalating battle of wills that puts her most deeply-held values to the test.
God’s Country is a 2022 thriller film starring Thandiwe Newton. The film was directed by Julian Higgins and starring Thandiwe Newton, Jeremy Bobb, Joris Jarsky, Jefferson White, Kai Lennox, Tanaya Beatty, Lynn Solomon, John Hosking, Joris Jarsky, Karen Jean Olds, Matthew Yetter and Travis W Bruyer. The film tells the story of a college professor who is drawn into an escalating battle of wills after she finds two hunters trespassing on her property.
Film Review for God’s Country
The rolling hills and icy plains of God’s Country are equal parts bleak and beautiful. In Julian Higgins’ feature directorial debut, co-written with Shaye Ogbonna, the mountains that were “there before people” serve as a Rorschach test for its characters: How do you survive this desolate wilderness? What past legacy or future promise do these lands hold? What are we owed, and what must we take for ourselves?
The hero of this modern-day morality tale grapples with such distinctly American questions in ways that white European settlers following their manifest destiny did not. A lyrical character study inside a quasi-Western thriller, God’s Country features a never-better Thandiwe Newton embodying that ethical struggle to haunting, unsettling effect.
Newton plays Sandra Guidry, a Black professor in a rural Montana college town. Originally from New Orleans, she splits time between her university and a solitary existence at a property on the edge of a national forest. Not long after the death of her ailing mother, a red truck appears in her driveway, setting off a series of escalating conflicts with men keen on hunting in the wilderness behind her house.
The events of this story take place over seven days, each delineated with increasingly tense cuts to black. DeAndre James Allen-Toole’s score sneaks up on you, interwoven with a sound design from Zach Goheen that ratchets up the tension with each chapter: first the distant howling of wolves, eventually the nerve-jangling arrival of a freight train, even the ominous sounds of running water. Higgins, however, lets the bangs of gunshots create a bleak melody all their own.
From Sandra’s first standoff with the trespassers—one gruff but courteous (Joris Jarsky), one casually cruel (Jefferson White)—it’s clear she equates yielding ground with displaying weakness. While some might sort out neighborly conflict amongst themselves, as the town’s lone deputy (Jeremy Bobb) suggests to Sandra, she has no qualms about involving the authorities or, as the retaliations intensify, taking the law into her own hands. Piece by piece, we learn the reasons behind her tendency to “fight back, all the time,” as she urges a loyal student (Tanaya Beatty) in the film’s most riveting interlude.
Yet as cinematographer Andrew Wheeler’s spacious skies and purple mountain majesties remind us, this is America. The grieving Sandra’s trauma doesn’t need to be explosively dramatic; the mundane task of carving out a life here as a Black woman is traumatic enough. That’s at the heart of every conflict in God’s Country, from the way one of her interlopers dismisses her with a flicked cigarette to the impending vote for a new chair of her otherwise all-white, mostly male department.
The specifics of Sandra’s backstory contextualize what we come to realize is her simmering rage, but by simply defying the status quo in this town her every word and gesture carries an electric undercurrent of unease. You might find Sandra prickly or paranoid, but you’d have to be a visiting extraterrestrial with no knowledge of a country whose legacy includes the genocide of indigenous Americans and the enslavement of Africans to not know why. It’s notable that Higgins updated his source material, James Lee Burke’s short story “Winter Light” (which the filmmaker also adapted into an award-winning 2015 short), to center on a woman of color like few Westerns have.
God’s Country (2022)
Directed by: Julian Higgins
Starring: Thandiwe Newton, Jeremy Bobb, Joris Jarsky, Jefferson White, Kai Lennox, Tanaya Beatty, Lynn Solomon, John Hosking, Joris Jarsky, Karen Jean Olds, Matthew Yetter, Travis W Bruyer
Screenplay by: Julian Higgins, Shaye Ogbonna
Production Design by: Flora Ortega
Cinematography by: Andrew Wheeler
Film Editing by: Justin LaForge
Costume Design by: Kate Lindsay
Art Direction by: Abbie Alvarez
Music by: DeAndre James, Allen-Toole
MPAA Rating: R for language.
Distributed by: IFC Films
Release Date: September 16, 2022
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