You shouldn't watch Ted Geoghegan and Grady Hendrix's Mohawk (2017) if you have a low threshold for violence, but then maybe you shouldn't study American history, either. For most of its runtime this movie is pure action, but it's action backed by grief and love and the ferocious, tenacious hereness of political protest; everyone in the story is too individual to be a symbol and yet it's impossible not to feel the myth concentrated in its handful of characters, the eagle-winged sweep of manifest destiny and the gritty, bloody work of resisting it down to the bone. It's breathless and brutal, ragged and effective. Once it gets going, it doesn't let up. It may be the first time I've seen folk horror from the other side. I should like to see it more.
The events of the plot are fiction, tucked into a very real history of war and genocide. Upstate New York in 1814 is Mohawk land, the home of Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn) and her two lovers, the warrior Calvin Two Rivers (Justin Rain) and the British agent Joshua Pinsmail (Eamon Farren). All three are pressingly aware that the stated neutrality of the Mohawk in the War of 1812 is crumbling daily with American incursions—raids and scalpings, forts built ever closer to their longhouses—but clan mother Wentahawi (Sheri Foster) adamantly refuses offers of British aid, not unfairly suspicious of the constancy of a white man's affections and the promises he makes for his king with a sincerity that is either masterful snake oil or shockingly naive. Before the question of war can be formally raised, however, it's rendered fait accompli by Calvin's scorched-earth approach to protecting his own, and the messy fallout sets all three lovers on the run from the vengeance of battlefield-promoted Colonel Hezekiah Holt (Ezra Buzzington, his thin grizzled face as nineteenth-century as his name) and his grousing but obedient militiamen. "We are retrieving a prisoner. Nothing more." The ensuing cat-and-mouse is a simple and devastatingly powerful reversal. To the Americans, every step they take through a wilderness teeming with savages and redcoats is survival horror. To Oak and her family, it's a home invasion. This wooded river valley is safe, loved, familiar ground. Now there are murderers moving through it, men who shoot on sight unless they can capture for torture; men who call them "rats" and "vermin," "bucks" and "squaws." Worst of all, they do their killing as if they had a right to it. When veteran tracker Beal (Robert Longstreet) reminds his commanding officer that "this is Mohawk land. We're in their house," his warning is met with a calm certainty that rings already like a doom: "We are in the United States of America."
It is a pleasure to watch this story unfold from an indigenous perspective, without hedging or false equivalence. Neither Geoghegan nor Hendrix is Native American/First Nations, but Horn grew up on the Mohawk reserve at Kahnawake and her experience as well as her knowledge of the Mohawk language—Kanien'kéha, in which some of the film's most important lines are spoken—informs the finished script; it is striking how naturally the film establishes the Mohawk characters as its norm, from which the sympathetic but never not European Joshua varies and the American characters vary further still. Karim Hussain's camera cuts equally between the pursuers and the pursued, but while we are permitted to recognize the humanity of the Americans, we are never placed in sympathy with them. They are monsters of white supremacy and moral failure and their moments of compassion, confusion, and heart-rending bereavement serve as a cautionary reality check: just because villainy isn't a cartoon when we meet it doesn't mean it gets a break. Even in the third act, when the hinted-at supernatural has come well and truly off Chekhov's wall in a clatter of deer bones and the sunlit warping of space and time, the film never reduces Oak to the frightful Other, the vengeful, monstrous haunting that she appears to the increasingly disintegrating soldiers. "When there's too much death," she told Joshua once, paddling a stolen canoe down the river whose afternoon tranquility on the heels of such carnage feels shockily unreal, "the blood seeps into the ground, soaks into the roots. The trees can't sleep. And the forest goes mad." That may be all that is happening now, and Oak with her recurring dream of a skull-masked, blood-thighed figure part of the madness. But we know her and where she came from, who she loved and for whom she is fighting still; we have never seen her as anything but human and we don't switch allegiances. ( This is our home. )
Mohawk is not a big movie. It was shot on location in less than three weeks with a budget that looks like a good-quality weekend reenactment; it has a go-for-broke DIY sensibility that pays off in the story choices as well as the hand-sewn, sweated-in mise-en-scène. I can't remember the last time I saw a polyamorous triad—a genuine, canonical OT3—as the casual romantic heroes of a movie, as tender, passionate, and committed as any central couple. Wentahawi disapproves, but strictly on grounds of nationality: "This Britisher only wants to use your body to protect him from American rifles—and to keep you both warm at night!" (Joshua responds in both Kanien'kéha and English that he would never hurt Calvin or Oak and though history may overtake his good intentions, we believe him.) Mohawk society insofar as we glimpse it is neither a lost utopia nor a foredoomed state of victimhood. Oak has a dry, wry sense of humor and a deadpan for the ages, but she is as far from stoic as the impetuous Calvin; there's no colors-of-the-wind nonsense in her outdoor coupling with Joshua, just two young people in love, a little drunk, a lot worried, and one of them making a wistful joke about "magical trees." I love that while the action scenes are vivid, disorienting, and unsparing without tipping into torture porn, they are governed by the technology of the time—longrifles may be more accurate than muskets, but you still have to reload after every damn shot and sometimes you shoot a guy in the finger when you were aiming for his head. I appreciate similarly the mix of woodcraft, geographical factors, and good and bad luck that dictates the moves available to both our heroes and our antagonists. My biggest complaint has to do with the cinematography: I thought after Dunkirk (2017) that I didn't like shaky-cam in 70 mm, but I'm starting to think I just don't like shaky-cam. I do like the dark, propulsive, synth-driven score by Wojciech Golczewski that doesn't sound a thing like the early nineteenth century and which I can't imagine these characters without. The whole small cast is full of strong performances, but I reserve especial admiration for the three-way chemistry of Horn, Rain, and Farren and for Buzzington's Kinski-grade descent into the heart of American darkness: "The Devil's in these woods, boy? Hellfire! The Devil shares my name."
I first read about this movie over the winter, when it was making festival rounds and attracting reviews; it's currently streaming on Netflix and if you're at all interested and can handle a gore level that supports the use of practical effects, I recommend it highly. You could watch it paired with Robert Eggers' The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) if you wanted two very different views on the forest; it might also contrast instructively with Antonia Bird's Ravenous (1999) as regards soldiers in places they should never have come. I don't know what other genre work to suggest for its matter-of-fact, Native-front-and-center frankness. I suppose it could be the first. Honestly I hope not. It is fascinating, by the way, to see a movie featuring Native Americans and U.S. soldiers that is not in any way a Western. Another reminder, perhaps, of how false and flattened the received image of this history has become. This corrective brought to you by my present backers at Patreon.
The events of the plot are fiction, tucked into a very real history of war and genocide. Upstate New York in 1814 is Mohawk land, the home of Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn) and her two lovers, the warrior Calvin Two Rivers (Justin Rain) and the British agent Joshua Pinsmail (Eamon Farren). All three are pressingly aware that the stated neutrality of the Mohawk in the War of 1812 is crumbling daily with American incursions—raids and scalpings, forts built ever closer to their longhouses—but clan mother Wentahawi (Sheri Foster) adamantly refuses offers of British aid, not unfairly suspicious of the constancy of a white man's affections and the promises he makes for his king with a sincerity that is either masterful snake oil or shockingly naive. Before the question of war can be formally raised, however, it's rendered fait accompli by Calvin's scorched-earth approach to protecting his own, and the messy fallout sets all three lovers on the run from the vengeance of battlefield-promoted Colonel Hezekiah Holt (Ezra Buzzington, his thin grizzled face as nineteenth-century as his name) and his grousing but obedient militiamen. "We are retrieving a prisoner. Nothing more." The ensuing cat-and-mouse is a simple and devastatingly powerful reversal. To the Americans, every step they take through a wilderness teeming with savages and redcoats is survival horror. To Oak and her family, it's a home invasion. This wooded river valley is safe, loved, familiar ground. Now there are murderers moving through it, men who shoot on sight unless they can capture for torture; men who call them "rats" and "vermin," "bucks" and "squaws." Worst of all, they do their killing as if they had a right to it. When veteran tracker Beal (Robert Longstreet) reminds his commanding officer that "this is Mohawk land. We're in their house," his warning is met with a calm certainty that rings already like a doom: "We are in the United States of America."
It is a pleasure to watch this story unfold from an indigenous perspective, without hedging or false equivalence. Neither Geoghegan nor Hendrix is Native American/First Nations, but Horn grew up on the Mohawk reserve at Kahnawake and her experience as well as her knowledge of the Mohawk language—Kanien'kéha, in which some of the film's most important lines are spoken—informs the finished script; it is striking how naturally the film establishes the Mohawk characters as its norm, from which the sympathetic but never not European Joshua varies and the American characters vary further still. Karim Hussain's camera cuts equally between the pursuers and the pursued, but while we are permitted to recognize the humanity of the Americans, we are never placed in sympathy with them. They are monsters of white supremacy and moral failure and their moments of compassion, confusion, and heart-rending bereavement serve as a cautionary reality check: just because villainy isn't a cartoon when we meet it doesn't mean it gets a break. Even in the third act, when the hinted-at supernatural has come well and truly off Chekhov's wall in a clatter of deer bones and the sunlit warping of space and time, the film never reduces Oak to the frightful Other, the vengeful, monstrous haunting that she appears to the increasingly disintegrating soldiers. "When there's too much death," she told Joshua once, paddling a stolen canoe down the river whose afternoon tranquility on the heels of such carnage feels shockily unreal, "the blood seeps into the ground, soaks into the roots. The trees can't sleep. And the forest goes mad." That may be all that is happening now, and Oak with her recurring dream of a skull-masked, blood-thighed figure part of the madness. But we know her and where she came from, who she loved and for whom she is fighting still; we have never seen her as anything but human and we don't switch allegiances. ( This is our home. )
Mohawk is not a big movie. It was shot on location in less than three weeks with a budget that looks like a good-quality weekend reenactment; it has a go-for-broke DIY sensibility that pays off in the story choices as well as the hand-sewn, sweated-in mise-en-scène. I can't remember the last time I saw a polyamorous triad—a genuine, canonical OT3—as the casual romantic heroes of a movie, as tender, passionate, and committed as any central couple. Wentahawi disapproves, but strictly on grounds of nationality: "This Britisher only wants to use your body to protect him from American rifles—and to keep you both warm at night!" (Joshua responds in both Kanien'kéha and English that he would never hurt Calvin or Oak and though history may overtake his good intentions, we believe him.) Mohawk society insofar as we glimpse it is neither a lost utopia nor a foredoomed state of victimhood. Oak has a dry, wry sense of humor and a deadpan for the ages, but she is as far from stoic as the impetuous Calvin; there's no colors-of-the-wind nonsense in her outdoor coupling with Joshua, just two young people in love, a little drunk, a lot worried, and one of them making a wistful joke about "magical trees." I love that while the action scenes are vivid, disorienting, and unsparing without tipping into torture porn, they are governed by the technology of the time—longrifles may be more accurate than muskets, but you still have to reload after every damn shot and sometimes you shoot a guy in the finger when you were aiming for his head. I appreciate similarly the mix of woodcraft, geographical factors, and good and bad luck that dictates the moves available to both our heroes and our antagonists. My biggest complaint has to do with the cinematography: I thought after Dunkirk (2017) that I didn't like shaky-cam in 70 mm, but I'm starting to think I just don't like shaky-cam. I do like the dark, propulsive, synth-driven score by Wojciech Golczewski that doesn't sound a thing like the early nineteenth century and which I can't imagine these characters without. The whole small cast is full of strong performances, but I reserve especial admiration for the three-way chemistry of Horn, Rain, and Farren and for Buzzington's Kinski-grade descent into the heart of American darkness: "The Devil's in these woods, boy? Hellfire! The Devil shares my name."
I first read about this movie over the winter, when it was making festival rounds and attracting reviews; it's currently streaming on Netflix and if you're at all interested and can handle a gore level that supports the use of practical effects, I recommend it highly. You could watch it paired with Robert Eggers' The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015) if you wanted two very different views on the forest; it might also contrast instructively with Antonia Bird's Ravenous (1999) as regards soldiers in places they should never have come. I don't know what other genre work to suggest for its matter-of-fact, Native-front-and-center frankness. I suppose it could be the first. Honestly I hope not. It is fascinating, by the way, to see a movie featuring Native Americans and U.S. soldiers that is not in any way a Western. Another reminder, perhaps, of how false and flattened the received image of this history has become. This corrective brought to you by my present backers at Patreon.
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