Wednesday, August 20, 2025

East of Wall (dir. Kate Beecroft, 2025)

I was grateful to breathe a sigh of relief last weekend while watching East of Wall, the first film I’ve seen at the cinema so far this year that didn’t feel either like a total bore or a letdown to me on some level. It’s reassuring to see a movie that not only holds together well and very intentionally inspires the viewer, but that also looks unsparingly at difficult but important topics such as poverty, suicide, and how women’s lives fit against the widescreen backdrop of the sprawling (and typically overly masculinized) American West. An impressive hybrid of fictionalized documentary filmmaking written and directed by Kate Beecroft, East of Wall brings to mind several other recent films that I enjoyed just as much: Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and The Rider, Morrisa Maltz’s The Unknown Country, Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song, and Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete.

What distinguishes East of Wall from those other films are its stars, amateur actors who are also a mother/daughter pair, Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga, whom Beecroft met incidentally while traveling through South Dakota on the 3,000-acre horse ranch that Tabatha oversees. Tabatha has a rebellious, upstart personality and a mane of blond hair with a buzzcut on one side of her head, as well a quiet, intuitive understanding of her horses and their needs. She possesses an entrepreneurial insight about her horses’ strengths and marketability, using TikTok videos of Porshia and her friends riding the horses at local rodeos, in order to sell the horses at auctions. During that pursuit, she meets Roy (Scoot McNairy), who offers to purchase her ranch and make her life easier in the wake of her husband’s sudden death. Tabatha takes care not only of the horses on the ranch but also her children and a gang of teenagers who’ve landed there over time, which increasingly made ends somewhat harder to meet. Roy has a personal investment in continuing to train Porshia as a horse rider, too, having lost his own daughter to suicide. Tabatha will ultimately safeguard her own interests, naturally, from being overridden by those of the wealthy intruder.

Porshia narrates portions of the film in a voiceover style that’s reminiscent of Linda Manz’s classic child’s-eye-view narration in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Those spells of Porshia’s reflective thoughts about her family and the geological origins of the dramatic landscape on which she was raised have a cumulative power that forms the emotional framework of the film. We also watch her galloping briskly on her horse at speeds that can almost keep pace with cars on a highway, in visuals that are a direct homage to the very first motion picture: the sequential images of a galloping horse by Eadweard Muybridge from 1878. Is that kind of referential connection lost on an audience at the multiplex these days? Probably, but I also sense that the historical bridge to it remains implicit. We are treading on territory that has primitive value and meaning, especially regarding the inherent and inherited violence of both the American landscape and the American enterprise. It’s a particular brand of violence that persists just as it always has, yet continues to shapeshift and take on new forms in the present day.

Perhaps the main reason to watch East of Wall on the big screen at a cinema is to see how finely it showcases the Badlands of South Dakota via breathtaking aerial drone footage. We hear in Porshia’s narration about how the Badlands’ canyon-like structure was carved by an ocean that used to flow right on top of it and the intense speed with which the water drained away millennia ago. That ancient natural force is just one of many ghosts that haunt the movie. Another is memorably depicted by the always excellent English actress Jennifer Ehle, who portrays Tabatha’s ne’er-do-well mother Tracey as a livewire of compressed yet jaded energy, serving as a sort of humorous release valve and ballast to Tabatha’s forthright attitude and stoic seriousness about her own responsibilities to protect and safeguard her family. Tabatha rarely ever smiles or laughs in the film, in part because she realizes how much everybody who surrounds her at all hours of the day and night, including her mother, is relying on her to keep all of them going, though she takes it all in stride with a measured sense of ordered chaos, from her eldest son Skylar (Wyatt Mansfield) to her semi-adopted son Jesse (Jesse Thorson), right down to her little blond three-year-old son Stetson (Stetson Neumann), who’s inherited the horse ranch from Tabatha’s late husband John.

And John, of course, is the main ghost who haunts the film. We see the family at his gravesite early in the movie, and then we finally hear the full story of his suicide in graphic detail from Tabatha later in the film, at a fireside gathering of the community’s women in celebration of her mother’s birthday. After the women bond over some drinks in a circle around the amber glow of the campfire, the conversation turns quieter as each woman recalls point-blank a harrowing memory of trauma or heartbreak that they’ve endured. I’m certain that Tabatha Zimiga’s unadorned delivery of her monologue during that scene will be the most riveting moment by any actor in a film this year, and she should absolutely receive recognition for her performance during next year’s awards season. East of Wall and Tabatha Zimiga’s subdued powerhouse performance are unique cinematic rarities.


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