During the 1840s, six settlers and their guide are caught in a dangerous situation: They are lost, food and water are running out, and the surrounding desert threatens to claim them all. Meanwhile, their guide, Stephen Meek (an unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood), refuses to acknowledge that they may be several weeks off-course. When a Native American (Rod Rondeaux) is captured, Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), one of the settlers, shields him from Meek's wrath.
Kelly Reichardt's survival film offers a radically modest take on the Western. It's here that she fully mastered her unparalleled sense of proportion, where one minor decision leads to a constellation of consequences. She also inverts the genre brilliantly, telling this story mostly through the eyes of the women in the caravan, whose limited power serves to amplify the tension and stakes of an increasingly dire circumstance. Williams work here is as strong as anything in her lengthy body of work, alternately resilient and devastatingly vulnerable. She and Reichardt met at a Yo La Tengo concert, naturally, and it's here, in the second of their four films together so far, that their collaboration really blossomed.