In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone made a deep impression with her stillness and controlled presence. This is different; in a fiction-feature debut from Native American documentary-maker Erica Tremblay, Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.
Gladstone plays Jax, living on Oklahoma’s Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation, trying to put behind her a life of dealing drugs but still on the fringes of crime. She has been looking after her teen niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), since the disappearance of Roki’s mother Tawi, but Roki fervently believes that Tawi will reappear for the annual powwow at which they once the stole the show with their mother-daughter dance. Things are even more complicated by the fact that Jax’s father is white; this is Frank (Shea Whigham) who, since the death of Jax’s mother, has remarried Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski), a white woman.
Now Frank and Nancy are stopping by Jax’s home, supposedly to be friendly, to “check in on her” – but actually, Jax suspects, to suggest themselves as more appropriate foster parents for young Roki, because though Frank and Nancy are not going to say it out loud, Tawi was involved in some shady stuff that could have caused her disappearance, and Jax may well vanish the same way. In a way, the movie’s general theme is disappearance: that kind of precarious visibility for Native American peoples which causes them to disappear without the authorities taking note. There is pain here, but stoicism and tough determination to survive.