Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

There’s a shot in the middle of The Unknown Country of a ticker sign standing high above a gas station, and it reads WELCOME TO MID AMERICA.

If The Unknown Country were more on the nose—and thankfully, it isn’t—that could have served as an alternate title. At a run time of 85 minutes, this movie is unusually short, and yet also unusually expansive, a unique sort of road movie, following its protagonist, Tana (Lily Gladstone, who also cowrote the script with Morrisa MaltzLainey and Bearkiller Shangreaux), from Minneapolis to South Dakota to West Texas.

If you were to go in cold with The Unknown Country, knowing nothing about it, you might wonder what the hell you’re watching. Director Morrisa Maltz really takes her time in revealing what Tana’s story is. At first, all we know is that she’s leaving her snowy home by herself, and on the road. We get constant snippets of talk radio, which last throughout the film.

Soon enough, though, we learn that she’s been invited to a cousin’s wedding in South Dakota, she’s coming from Minneapolis after the death of a family member, and she’s coming back to a town full of relatives she hasn’t seen since she was eight years old.

At this point, I began to think maybe the whole movie was just about Tana reconnecting with her family, who we learn are Native American. I found myself wondering, did the existence of the excellent FX series Reservation Dogs help open the door for the production of a movie like this? I later learned that Lily Gladstone, here in very much an indie film, will costar later this year in the highly anticipated Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon.

The Unknown Country is a sort of portrait of Middle America, not just of an Indigenous person and her family—but from their perspective, and particularly from Tana’s, as she navigates the grief over the loss of her grandmother, while navigating the literal middle of the country. Bit by bit, those talk radio snippets reveal a time setting, sometime not long after the 2016 election.

I was a bit annoyed by Andrew Hajek’s cinematography, so shaky was it with handheld camera, following Tana right into her freezing car. As the film goes on, though, the cinematography really augments the tone, which stops just short of dreamlike, with many quick cuts that paint a portrait rather than indicate a short attention span.

As Tana meets many people on her travels, we get brief interludes with select people narrating their own, separate stories. This includes the young couple getting married, who deliberately had a child just so their disapproving parents could no longer try and keep them apart. There is something both very generic and very specific about the wedding sequence, in which none of the dialogue is profound but the weight and sweetness of the ceremony is. When the young couple is pronounced married, their little girl joins them in holding all their hands together.

Tana eventually moves on from South Dakota, though, bringing along with her an old suitcase that belonged to her grandmother, given to her by her great uncle. Tana drives great distances, we see her stop at motels and gas stations and diners, and somehow a 1,400-mile road trip gets rendered in a film clocking in at fewer than ninety minutes without feeling rushed.

It’s not until Tana makes a pit stop in Dallas, the only truly urban setting in the film, and spends an evening hanging out with a local group of young friends, that we finally learn precisely why she left Minneapolis, where she’s headed in Texas, and get a feeling for why she was away from her home in South Dakota for so long. Some things stay unsaid, such as whatever happened to Tana’s parents, who are never even mentioned. This feels okay, because that’s not the story being told here.

The Unknown Country is the kind of movie that seeps into your soul, if you give it long enough. There’s a couple of moments of moderate tension with strange, leering men on the road, but that’s the closest this gets to drama. This is a mood piece. I can see needing to be in the right mood in order for it to work. All I can say is, my mood was right for it, as I left the theater with a feeling of warmth toward it, grateful for having seen it, a lack of resolution or even a conventional story arc notwithstanding.

*The road to appreciation for that which has not been much considered.*

Overall: B+