Winter's Bone

WINTER’S BONE is one of the scariest, most horrifying films I’ve seen all year.  And it isn’t even a horror movie.

Ree Dolly lives in a dirt road cabin in rural Missouri.  Just seventeen, she cares for her two younger siblings and her catatonic mother.  Her father’s a felon, a meth cooker, and he posted the cabin and land for his most recent bail bond.  The sheriff comes around to tell her that her dad jumped bail.  She has about a week to either find him or clear off.  Nobody cares that she and her charges have nowhere to clear off to.

None of which is scary or horrifying.  It’s sad, and it’s compelling, but the scary and horrifying part comes later, when she starts looking.  See, Ree Dolly has deep roots in Southern Missouri.  She’s related, one way or another, to nearly everyone who might know where her father is.  Problem is, she’s from an extended family of drug makers, drug dealers, and drug takers.  Her people, the only people she has, treat her with hostility, suspicion, and fear.  Yes, there are some bright spots, but this young woman lives in a universe so full of secrets and violence that even her closest allies think nothing of threatening and intimidating her not because they have particular cause to, but because it’s the only way they know how to deal with people.

WINTER’S BONE combines this poisonous social atmosphere with the cold, icy, wet, and dead milieu of wintertime among the rural poor in Southern Missouri.  Ree’s increasing desperation combines with the brutality of her physical and social worlds to create a sense of claustrophobia, hopelessness, dread, and even fear.  When her quest culminates in an episode of jaw-clenching, gut-roiling horror, we’re left aghast and destroyed.

This is amazing stuff.  Jennifer Lawrence gives Ree such hard-edged, desperate, and even mean humanity that we feel for her and we root for her, even though we may not necessarily like her.  The supporting cast, particularly Deadwood’s John Hawkes as an uncle who’d be a nightmare in anyone’s family and Dale Dickey, a second or third cousin who’s even worse, flesh out a world of bitter, hard, and variably moral people that felt utterly authentic and absolutely scary.

As I think of it, I can’t recall a foot WINTER’S BONE puts wrong.  This film will find a place on my top ten of 2010.