So this starts off as a low-key family drama — a young Korean-American family in the early ’80s moves to rural Arkansas because the dad has dreams of being a farmer and owning his own land. But his wife is super not into this plan and was apparently not fully informed of exactly what they were moving to.

So that’s one source of drama, along with the obvious “moving from urban California to rural Arkansas” culture shock thing (though this is mostly backgrounded throughout the movie; the real focus is the relationships between the family members.)

But then the movie gets tense, and starts laying guns on all kinds of mantels. The boy has a bad heart. There’s a crick that apparently has dangerous snakes. There’s a tornado warning that makes their mobile home feel super-unsafe. There’s a neighbor who is hyper-religious and not entirely all there (like, he spends Sundays dragging a cross down the road, and talks in tongues a lot).

And so there are all these things hanging over the movie just waiting to blow up, and I kept waiting for it to turn into the tragedy that I knew it was going to be. And I don’t want to spoil this — there are bad things that happen, sometimes very bad things — but fundamentally it just never goes quite as badly as I kept expecting it to. It mostly stays a movie about the relationships between these family members.

And thinking about it afterward, I don’t think the movie was meant to be that tense. I think all the horror movies I’ve been watching[1] maybe warped my expectations, because sometimes a snake isn’t actually a force of death, it’s just a metaphor for life.

So, idk, I think I watched this movie weird, and that’s probably on me, but… I also kinda don’t get why this one was so praised. Like, it’s a well-made movie, it’s doing some interesting things, it has some interesting characters. (The relationship between the grandma and the kid was really well done, I thought.) But the core conflict between the husband and wife — really, their whole relationship — felt flat and didn’t work for me. And that really is what so much of the movie is about, so it’s a dead zone in the middle of a movie, even if it is surrounded by interesting stuff.

I think my final take on this one is kinda just meh. Although also, I don’t know, I wasn’t super-absorbed while I was watching it, but already as I think back on it, I’m more positive — I’m remembering the interesting bits and skipping lightly over the boring bits. I feel like this is a movie that a year from now I might remember as near-great, even if I wasn’t impressed with it while watching it. Lightly recommended, I guess.

  1. To be fair, the snake thing is kind of a big deal in The Underground Railroad, too. ↩︎