Hunting Lands is a 2018 drama about a reclusive veteran who yearns to escape from the complexities of the modern world.
By their very nature, movies are all about imagery. We don’t go the theater to read, and yet, filmmakers have, since the beginning, wrestled with setup. How does one get an audience into the world we see on screen and have us understand? The very best do it with visuals alone, establishing just enough about a character and their motivations to set a hook. If you’ve seen Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood then you know right away one of the best examples ever made of how to do it right. Most however settle on blocks of text or narration, and while absolutely some movies make this work, too often it robs the viewer of any chance to make their own choices.
Zack Wilcox‘s directorial debut is called Hunting Lands, and it too, like There Will Be Blood, revels in its silence. Opening in the snowy woods of Michigan, we follow a man we soon learn is named Frank Olsen (Marshall Cook). He’s hunting deer and tracks a buck to a clearing where, with a single shot, gets a kill. He field strips the animal and loads it onto a makeshift travois, dragging it along the trail back to his small cabin in the trees. However, along the way, he spots in the near distance, a man back a pickup truck to a riverbed and drop a hefty bundle wrapped in blue tarp into the snow, only to drive away. Still in total silence, Frank makes his way to the dumping ground and discovers a badly beaten woman, unconscious and left for dead. He carries her back to his home and calls a friend for help, then deciding he will take care of this on his own. It’s a choice that will have devastating consequences.
How we learn about Frank and why he’s in the woods comes through very limited dialogue, Wilcox, who co-wrote the script, relying heavily on a kind of over-the shoulder voyeuristic approach that has us embedded in Frank’s odyssey from the start. His isolation is a bit legendary in the nearby town, a place we actually spend a great deal of time travelling about as Frank takes to learning more about the man who dumped the girl. It’s an intriguing sequence that runs almost a third of the film, again devoid of a single word, us in Frank’s truck cabin, stealthily keeping tabs on a figure we discover is caught in his own web.
Frank has a plan, and while it’s unspoken, it’s very clear. However, he’s a man of troubled history, some we are not meant to fully understand, though it weighs on him heavily. Wilcox spins a great deal of tension in the muted moments, building two well-defined characters with barely a word between them, and it’s pretty commendable how well that works. We create our own expectations about where it will lead, and the silence becomes a kind of rush, which is why when it does get talky – by this film’s standards – in the last act, it sort of feels unnecessary. Still, this is a dark personal journey, a story about a man ruined by his experiences and finding himself now on the seat of judgement. “Everything has an impact,” Frank says at one point. Indeed.