Leave No Trace

 Will (Bill Foster) and her daughter Tom (Thomasina McKenzie) live off the grid in the wilds of a national park just off Portland. Living off the land and evading detection from forest rangers, their routine includes homeschooling, survivalism, training drills in covering their tracks in case they need to escape quietly from the authorities, and forays into town to stock up on essentials and the few luxuries they can get by trading Will's meds for money (Tom, waving a chocolate bar: Need or want? Will: Both.)
 It's an appealing, very (but not uniquely) American Thoreau-style fantasy, brought vividly to life by director Debra Granik with a naturalistic, unshowy style and the same lack of melodrama she brought to the superb Winter's Bone.

 Will and Tom, despite their best precautions, are soon discovered by the authorities and sent to be processed by an inhumane bureaucratic system that doesn't quite know what to do with them, and is all set to fail them horribly. But, in my favorite touch (and something that will be a running theme throughout the movie) the people around them - in this case, the social workers assigned to them - quickly empathise with them and go out of their way to help them navigate the battery of questionnaires and personality tests set up to act as a barrier any sort of social help these days.

 This might be about the only movie I've seen that paints a rosy picture of the American welfare system; it might not square with reality, but it works well within the reality of this movie.

Got to love the ironic use of wallpaper here...

 Will and Tom are reunited, and luck out when a Christmas tree farmer hears about the case and offers Will a job, and a small worker's cabin for him and his daughter. But while Tom immediately makes the best of the situation, Will does not do well; every form he needs to fill, every other rule he needs to follow, he gets more and more restless, until he has enough and leaves again, taking his daughter up north.

 From there on the movie unspools until the simmering conflict between the two main characters boils over. It's a quiet, contemplative character study that's happy to forego story to instead observe day to day routines with an attention to procedural detail - be it bagging pines for use as Christmas trees, carving wood into kindling, or how rabbits are prepared for pageants.

 The acting is superb (this deservedly launched a career for Thomasina McKenzie the same way Winter's Bone launched Jennifer Lawrence's), the tone is unremittingly warm and humanistic, and it's compelling throughout even as it remains stubbornly low-key, with nothing happening for long stretches.

 It was one of the best movies I saw back in 2018, and it holds up just fine. Can't wait for Granik's next movie, hopefully sometime before 2026.