God's Country

Thandie Newton anchors this thoughtful, disturbing drama about a professor involved in a conflict with some local hunters that goes sideways from our expectations.

With a setup like “God’s Country,” you think you know exactly where the movie is going to go. But this thoughtful drama anchored by Thandie Newton constantly goes sideways from our expectations, layering in unexpected notes of gravity and discord.

Newton plays Cassandra (Sandra) Guidry, a professor of public speaking at a small college in some unnamed northern state where the winters are brutal and the people have built up their hides against the environment, and each other. As a Black woman in an almost entirely white community, with a few smatterings of native students, Sandra is profoundly otherized on a daily basis.

Sandra connects well with her students, especially Gretchen (Tanaya Beatty), a promising young native woman. But she is subtly ostracized from her department fellows, including the newly elevated dean, Arthur (Kai Lennox), a glad-hander who talks the talk about diversifying the faculty but has no get-up in his walk.

As the story opens, she is laying someone close to her to rest after a long illness. We’re not sure who just yet — we guess a spouse or lover. Sandra lives in a remote mountain canyon many miles from the school, and Arthur is her closest neighbor. She’s clearly someone who enjoys her solitude, chopping wood or going on runs with her dog.

One day she finds an old red Ford pickup parked on her property. Hunters are commonplace in these parts, but most know not to tread where they haven’t been invited.

She leaves a friendly note on the truck, and returns to find it crumpled in the snow along with a massacred animal. The truck is back the next day, and Sandra confronts the two men inside it.

The older, bearded one (Joris Jarsky) is put off by this mouthy woman of color telling him where he can and cannot go — but leaves, if begrudgingly. The younger one (Jefferson White) gives her the slant-eye stare in a way that makes her go rummaging in her attic for an old gun.

The stand-off escalates from there, which I’ll leave you to discover yourself.

Given this premise, we think we’re going to wade into a violence-soaked revenge saga of one resolute person standing up against a small group of bullies — latter-day Charles Bronson fare.

But director Julian Higgins, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Shaye Ogbonna, keeps surprising us. For instance, after things have gone past harsh words to an overt threat of violence, most movies would have Sandra respond in kind and things quickly get bloody.

Instead, she goes straight to the police. Unfortunately, in these parts that’s just one lonely sheriff’s deputy, Wolf (Jeremy Bobb), who takes her statement and explains that conflicts like these are generally resolved by the parties. Resorting to somebody like him with a badge tends to just stoke more resentment, he explains.

Still, he does his job and confronts the hunters with a warning. These encounters do not go how we expect. Suffice to say there are other matters at work that do not directly involve Sandra, but will color how her own complaint is received. She surprises us by deftly defusing a potentially volatile situation.

Newton plays this character very close to the vest. Her Sandra says very little that she doesn’t absolutely need to. She is self-confident and capable, but there are obviously experiences in her past that have caused her to build up her shell. These events will force her to start to come out of it and confront not only these locals’ deep sense of privilege, but her own pain and built-up scar tissue.

The subtext is about white patriarchy, and how men like the hunters — but also the ones in the stores, the churches, even the university — work, perhaps unconsciously but deliberately, to push down people like Sandra. Her fight is not just against a pair of interlopers on her land, but increasingly becomes about something much bigger and more malevolent.

“God’s Country” is one of those movies that sneaks up on you, a film of long takes and still, wordless scenes that sit with you and smolder.