Debra Granik, the writer-director who made quite a splash with Winter’s Bone (which launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence in 2010), has returned with Leave No Trace, which is also powerfully compelling. By rights, it shouldn’t be. By rights, this tale of a father and daughter who wish to keep themselves to themselves (essentially) should be as dull as ditchwater. It is slow. Little is said and little happens — it’s inaction-packed, if you like — yet it pulls you in and keeps you pulled in. I’m still turning it over in my mind days later. It will certainly leave a trace in you, in other words.
Adapted from Peter Rock’s novel My Abandonment, the film stars Ben Foster as Will, a Vietnam vet, and Thomasin McKenzie as his teenage daughter, Tom. The pair deliberately live an off-grid life in a national park outside Portland, Oregon, grubbing for mushrooms, catching rainwater, building fires, practising how to hide amid the ferns and the giant evergreens should the authorities ever call. Tom does not attend school, but learns from an old encyclopaedia, and her relationship with her father is tender, loving, mutually respectful. They share an intimate, intricate connection conveyed by the way they behave round one another, rather than through dialogue. We immediately understand their goal — leave us be! We’re fine! — and immediately share it. (Let them be! They’re fine!) But the authorities call — with sniffer dogs; bummer — and they’re forced into the system.
At this point you will think: oh, it’s that film. It’s the film where the system will eat them alive. Or at least it’s the film where the system will try to eat them alive. Or it’s the film where they enter the system as rebellious individuals but come out as zombies.
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