So I’d heard good things about this even before it got Oscar-nominated, and the nomination was my cue to watch it. I hadn’t really paid attention to what it was — I honestly thought it was some kind of meditative quasi-documentary on the theme of trains — and so was surprised to discover that it’s a period piece that’s essentially telling the story of a guy’s life.

We start in… well, I was going to say “the late 19th century,” because that’s what it feels like; but that chronology doesn’t really line up with the later parts of the movie, and turns out that actually it’s 1917. But it’s not a 1917 that’s full of jazz or world wars or whatever. We’re in the wilderness in the Pacific Northwest, and there are horses and trains and hand-built log cabins and dudes cutting down trees with long saws.

Anyway, we start with our protagonist as a young, aimless man, and then proceed to follow his life through various ups and downs and twists and turns through the long decades. This is a brand new movie, so I’m not going to spoil the plot, but I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the movie has a very biographical shape to it — it’s not about any particular big narrative arc, it’s a bunch of things that happen, some of which are just little moments and some of which resonate for decades. There are moments when it feels like the movie is about to lean into more of a narrative-driven shape, but it consistently refuses to.

It’s a gorgeous movie, with its Pacific Northwest landscapes; arguably too gorgeous. It feels at points like a golden hour cottagecore fantasy rather than a realistic movie. But then, it also has a bunch of shocking and semi-random violence in it, and periods of random misfortune, too, so maybe I shouldn’t begrudge it those dream-like happy moments.

But that too-pretty feeling is closely related to the tonal problem the movie has: It’s constantly teetering on the edge of sappy, manipulative sentimentality (exacerbated by the movie having a narrator who just outright verbalizes meaning as Max Richter-adjacent music plays). For me, at least, it didn’t go over the edge, and so it mostly worked. Even if some of the emotion the film is trying to evoke didn’t quite hit, the movie overall landed at very good (though not great). But I can fully understand both the viewer who’s entirely bought in and deeply moved by the movie, and the viewer who finds it all a little overwrought and silly.

(Also: The movie is honestly not that much like First Cow, but at the same time, c’mon: It’s a historical PacNW movie with lush outdoor landscapes in a 4:3 aspect ratio, which opens with a framing device of something found in the woods that portends a sad story in the past. It practically begs for the comparison.)