Night Moves is a film by Kelly Reichardt, who also made the heart-wrenching Wendy and Lucy (2008), which may be one of my favourite films of all time. (If you don’t know it, go look it up; I’m old now, so no longer have the energy to educate you in these matters.) Her films, she has said, are ‘just glimpses of people passing through’ but whereas you or I would make a film about people just passing through which would be just that — everyday people would pass through, uninterestingly — her understanding of character and narrative and character as narrative is so profound, these ordinary people become wholly absorbing. She also, I should mention, made the wonderful Meek’s Cutoff, but you’re going to have to look that up too.
This has been described as a ‘thriller’, although, in fact, it half is, half isn’t, as it changes mood somewhere in the middle, and becomes more about what guilt does to a person, and how it might push you over the edge, but there is nothing amiss with that.
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