I had wanted to see Jen McGowan's Rust Creek (2019) since its release in January, so I am pleased that I managed to get to it before the end of the year; I am even more pleased that it rewarded the wait. Unfolding over Thanksgiving weekend in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Kentucky, it incorporates elements of survival horror, country noir, and even fairy tale into my favorite kind of B-movie, tightly cast, neatly scripted, cleanly shot, and not so bound to the beats of its genre that it can't show me something unexpected among the thrills, like a stack of pennies as high as the Empire State Building. There's a heart under its cold bark and deadfall leaves. A beating heart means blood. Like Angela Carter, it knows the bones of its story: a girl, a wood, a wolf, and a knife.
Hermione Corfield stars as Sawyer Scott, a track-running senior at Centre College who gets the good news of a hard-won job interview in D.C. just in time for the holiday break. She has a young face, full-cheeked and self-contained under a heavy ponytail of streaked ash-brown hair, and she plans her nine-hour solo road trip with the confidence of the youthfully immortal, vibrating with nervous energy and the jangle-pop exuberance of the Blues and Greys' "New Shores"—take me far away from this town. Take me far away safe and sound. Armed with GPS directions, a rolling suitcase, and a French-tipped manicure, she settles into her battered old candy-red Jeep, but after rerouting as advised to avoid highway congestion, she ends up well off I-64 in a tightening labyrinth of bone-white oaks and pines like you shiver the whole night through in, where her phone fritzes on the verge of a plank bridge and an attempt to flatten out an old-fashioned paper map on the hood of her truck attracts the unwelcome attentions of pickup-driving brothers Hollister (Micah Hauptman) and Buck (Daniel R. Hill), a twitchy charmer and his obedient wingman whose folksy helpfulness creeps from merely unnecessary to actively threatening with the plausible-deniable envelope-pushing familiar to any woman who has ever been alone with men. One startling, messy flurry of action later, a bleeding Sawyer is sprinting through the overcast woods with two pissed-off men behind her. One ice-rimed sunrise after that, the men have come back with guns and an abandoned car report has come into the offices of the local law enforcement. Bruised and dirty and stubborn in her thin pink sweater and her blood-legged sweatpants, Sawyer staggers on through the knife-light between the barren trees, turning like a lost compass after her screen-shattered, low-signal phone. There's more at stake in this chase than mere male pride. And just as the audience begins to settle into the waiting game of a survival thriller, with the woodcraft of Sawyer's pursuers pitted against the ticking clock of her mother's unanswered calls and the complicating factors of hunger, exposure, and an increasingly disabling wound, the film shifts gears into something more delicate and ambiguous with the introduction of Lowell Pritchert (Jay Paulson), the red-bearded meth cook outside of whose trailer Sawyer collapses in the stumbling, head-swimming twilight of her second day on the run. Blue-eyed in black T-shirts and a charcoal-colored hoodie, he has an unpredictable, shape-shifting look, sometimes foxy, sometimes monastic; she throws lye in his face and wakes up leashed by her wrists to a radiator pipe and he makes her a bologna sandwich. He doesn't talk much, in his creaky, uninflected dry-brush voice, and when he does it's mostly chemistry. He may be the most trustworthy person for twenty miles around; he's almost certainly the smartest. We're off the edges of Google's map, far from the athletic, academic sunlight of downtown Danville. He might not be wolf; that doesn't make him woodsman.
After the premise which demonstrates, explosively and efficiently, that all a life needs to go totally sideways is a couple of seconds, the relationship between Lowell and Sawyer is the most classically noirish aspect of the film and I love it, right down to or most of all the fact that it isn't a romance. It's a meeting of accidental affinities, unforeseen and volatile. Sawyer isn't as much of an outsider in this story as the traditional out-of-towner in the backwoods: a college girl, sure, but she shares the twangy accent of the men who offered their disingenuous roadside assistance; geographically as well as figuratively, she and the Pritcherts might not be such distant kin as that. Lowell may have been cooking meth without benefit of higher education since age fourteen, but his longevity in a field where every ingredient is "corrosive, flammable, both" makes him anything but dumb. Needled by Sawyer that he's "like one of those European pop bands that sing in English but don't actually know what any of the lyrics mean," he goes on quietly scissoring the friction strips off a bucketful of matchbooks and then asks her to pass him a pitcher of acetone, whose evaporating chill provides the springboard for an equally laconic, matter-of-fact chemistry lesson that leaves the audience in no doubt that if he had to break the science of meth-making down to the level of equations, this hollow-eyed coal-country man could do it in his sleep. "Like a bunch of little science projects," Sawyer recognizes, responding to the alchemy of it. With the grim little deadpan that might just be his resting face, Lowell agrees: "Yeah, and just about every one of them will kill you." By way of Exhibit A, he shows off a thermos of anhydrous ammonia. The film hints at his past with notes like a half-charred photograph, a wedding band with no mate, and lines like "Besides, there's too many ghosts in these woods," but it is not delved into any more than the furious determination that we understand has gotten Sawyer thus far in her life and will keep carrying her as long as she needs it, as long as she can stay alive. We observe instead the effects of these hidden histories on their interactions in the present: that's all we can share. "I don't got it figured out in my head yet," Lowell muses in one of the film's fragile interludes of downtime—generally dictated by the rhythms of life in a meth lab, in this case the aftermath of a successful cook and the necessary disposal of the tell-tale byproducts in the silt-stained river which gives the film its name—"but it's like . . . like in our life everyone we meet's a chemical reaction. They change us and we change them. 'Cause we changed, we can go on and have different reactions with other people. And we don't always know how it'll end up." Set against this philosophy is a moment of aggressive camaraderie with his crystal-dealing cousins, which we realize we do not quite know the character well enough to take purely as either pretense or reveal. We hold our knowledge of Sawyer against our uncertainty of Lowell against the wider machinations of home-cooked meth and Mexican cartels in Kentucky and it is a testament to the characters' weird rapport that Sawyer is speaking only half ironically when she remarks, in borrowed jeans and plaid flannel workshirt, stretching her stiffened leg out in a deck chair on Lowell's porch, "I think I might be starting to get used to the quiet country life."
The screenplay for Rust Creek was written by Julie Lipson from a story credited to Lipson and producer Stu Pollard and it takes some pains to take place in the real world. I love its first fight scene because it requires nothing more superhuman of Sawyer than the muscle memory of a self-defense class and the reality that most stage combat tactfully sidesteps nut-shots because they are kind of incapacitating. Nobody has time for one-liners when fleeing for their lives. You sleep out in the Appalachians in late November, you wake in the morning frost-paled and wind-rawed and stiff-fingered beyond the impediment of acrylic nails. Sawyer's makeshift first aid is the less blood-soaked of two socks, Lowell's a gallon of milk poured over a burn. I appreciate similarly the inclusion of details that are not red herrings and oversights that are not plot holes because not everything in a life is dramatically significant; sometimes people slip up, sometimes cars have janky transmissions, sometimes a conversation never comes off the wall. I may honestly find the most plot-necessary material in this story the least compelling, by which I mean the scenes with earnest rookie Deputy Katz (Jeremy Glazer), long-time good ol' boy Sheriff O'Doyle (Sean O'Bryan), and no-nonsense State Police Commander Slattery (John Marshall Jones); they are well-acted and they build texture into this effectively seven-character world, but their moves are more familiar than anything that passes between Lowell and Sawyer or even Lowell, Holly, and Buck. At least they look good, lensed like the rest of this natural-lit production with a refreshing scarcity of shaky-cam by Michelle Lawler, who can make the fall-stripped forest look bleak, beautiful, homey, and Grimm by turns. I am also fond of the score by H. Scott Salinas which sounds like eerie winter folk, scrap-metal fiddles and singing ice. Mostly what I can evaluate about the art direction by Priyanka Guterres and the costume design by Alexis Scott is that it aids the feral, autumnal, granite-and-blood-nailed atmosphere of the movie, like being swallowed up by the wilderness of American myth, huger and wilder and more intricate on the inside than it looked from the treeline. If you are noting a preponderance of female names in this crew, it looks like a conscious attempt at parity on the part of the production company; perhaps that explains the low dose of sexual violence in a subgenre whose narrative tropes all but budget for it. Grab-ass, yes, rape, no. The threat of being murdered for something you may not even have seen is plot momentum enough. Since I have a habit of taxonomies or at least double features, this movie aligns itself in my head with other indie thrillers like Mohawk (2017) and Small Town Crime (2017); it would be unfair on both sides to describe it as the exploitation version of Winter's Bone (2010), but I will if it gets people interested enough to rent or stream it. It runs 108 minutes and could maybe have been shorter, but I like how it hangs out in the small beats, where there's room for hope and fear to bloom. Sawyer palming a bradawl. Lowell shrugging, "Can't cook heroin." How casually and centrally the river idles through the mise-en-scène, taking its color from iron clay, red phosphorus, blood. I suspect it is even a good Thanksgiving movie, if you're looking for one. This change brought to you by my different backers at Patreon.
Hermione Corfield stars as Sawyer Scott, a track-running senior at Centre College who gets the good news of a hard-won job interview in D.C. just in time for the holiday break. She has a young face, full-cheeked and self-contained under a heavy ponytail of streaked ash-brown hair, and she plans her nine-hour solo road trip with the confidence of the youthfully immortal, vibrating with nervous energy and the jangle-pop exuberance of the Blues and Greys' "New Shores"—take me far away from this town. Take me far away safe and sound. Armed with GPS directions, a rolling suitcase, and a French-tipped manicure, she settles into her battered old candy-red Jeep, but after rerouting as advised to avoid highway congestion, she ends up well off I-64 in a tightening labyrinth of bone-white oaks and pines like you shiver the whole night through in, where her phone fritzes on the verge of a plank bridge and an attempt to flatten out an old-fashioned paper map on the hood of her truck attracts the unwelcome attentions of pickup-driving brothers Hollister (Micah Hauptman) and Buck (Daniel R. Hill), a twitchy charmer and his obedient wingman whose folksy helpfulness creeps from merely unnecessary to actively threatening with the plausible-deniable envelope-pushing familiar to any woman who has ever been alone with men. One startling, messy flurry of action later, a bleeding Sawyer is sprinting through the overcast woods with two pissed-off men behind her. One ice-rimed sunrise after that, the men have come back with guns and an abandoned car report has come into the offices of the local law enforcement. Bruised and dirty and stubborn in her thin pink sweater and her blood-legged sweatpants, Sawyer staggers on through the knife-light between the barren trees, turning like a lost compass after her screen-shattered, low-signal phone. There's more at stake in this chase than mere male pride. And just as the audience begins to settle into the waiting game of a survival thriller, with the woodcraft of Sawyer's pursuers pitted against the ticking clock of her mother's unanswered calls and the complicating factors of hunger, exposure, and an increasingly disabling wound, the film shifts gears into something more delicate and ambiguous with the introduction of Lowell Pritchert (Jay Paulson), the red-bearded meth cook outside of whose trailer Sawyer collapses in the stumbling, head-swimming twilight of her second day on the run. Blue-eyed in black T-shirts and a charcoal-colored hoodie, he has an unpredictable, shape-shifting look, sometimes foxy, sometimes monastic; she throws lye in his face and wakes up leashed by her wrists to a radiator pipe and he makes her a bologna sandwich. He doesn't talk much, in his creaky, uninflected dry-brush voice, and when he does it's mostly chemistry. He may be the most trustworthy person for twenty miles around; he's almost certainly the smartest. We're off the edges of Google's map, far from the athletic, academic sunlight of downtown Danville. He might not be wolf; that doesn't make him woodsman.
After the premise which demonstrates, explosively and efficiently, that all a life needs to go totally sideways is a couple of seconds, the relationship between Lowell and Sawyer is the most classically noirish aspect of the film and I love it, right down to or most of all the fact that it isn't a romance. It's a meeting of accidental affinities, unforeseen and volatile. Sawyer isn't as much of an outsider in this story as the traditional out-of-towner in the backwoods: a college girl, sure, but she shares the twangy accent of the men who offered their disingenuous roadside assistance; geographically as well as figuratively, she and the Pritcherts might not be such distant kin as that. Lowell may have been cooking meth without benefit of higher education since age fourteen, but his longevity in a field where every ingredient is "corrosive, flammable, both" makes him anything but dumb. Needled by Sawyer that he's "like one of those European pop bands that sing in English but don't actually know what any of the lyrics mean," he goes on quietly scissoring the friction strips off a bucketful of matchbooks and then asks her to pass him a pitcher of acetone, whose evaporating chill provides the springboard for an equally laconic, matter-of-fact chemistry lesson that leaves the audience in no doubt that if he had to break the science of meth-making down to the level of equations, this hollow-eyed coal-country man could do it in his sleep. "Like a bunch of little science projects," Sawyer recognizes, responding to the alchemy of it. With the grim little deadpan that might just be his resting face, Lowell agrees: "Yeah, and just about every one of them will kill you." By way of Exhibit A, he shows off a thermos of anhydrous ammonia. The film hints at his past with notes like a half-charred photograph, a wedding band with no mate, and lines like "Besides, there's too many ghosts in these woods," but it is not delved into any more than the furious determination that we understand has gotten Sawyer thus far in her life and will keep carrying her as long as she needs it, as long as she can stay alive. We observe instead the effects of these hidden histories on their interactions in the present: that's all we can share. "I don't got it figured out in my head yet," Lowell muses in one of the film's fragile interludes of downtime—generally dictated by the rhythms of life in a meth lab, in this case the aftermath of a successful cook and the necessary disposal of the tell-tale byproducts in the silt-stained river which gives the film its name—"but it's like . . . like in our life everyone we meet's a chemical reaction. They change us and we change them. 'Cause we changed, we can go on and have different reactions with other people. And we don't always know how it'll end up." Set against this philosophy is a moment of aggressive camaraderie with his crystal-dealing cousins, which we realize we do not quite know the character well enough to take purely as either pretense or reveal. We hold our knowledge of Sawyer against our uncertainty of Lowell against the wider machinations of home-cooked meth and Mexican cartels in Kentucky and it is a testament to the characters' weird rapport that Sawyer is speaking only half ironically when she remarks, in borrowed jeans and plaid flannel workshirt, stretching her stiffened leg out in a deck chair on Lowell's porch, "I think I might be starting to get used to the quiet country life."
The screenplay for Rust Creek was written by Julie Lipson from a story credited to Lipson and producer Stu Pollard and it takes some pains to take place in the real world. I love its first fight scene because it requires nothing more superhuman of Sawyer than the muscle memory of a self-defense class and the reality that most stage combat tactfully sidesteps nut-shots because they are kind of incapacitating. Nobody has time for one-liners when fleeing for their lives. You sleep out in the Appalachians in late November, you wake in the morning frost-paled and wind-rawed and stiff-fingered beyond the impediment of acrylic nails. Sawyer's makeshift first aid is the less blood-soaked of two socks, Lowell's a gallon of milk poured over a burn. I appreciate similarly the inclusion of details that are not red herrings and oversights that are not plot holes because not everything in a life is dramatically significant; sometimes people slip up, sometimes cars have janky transmissions, sometimes a conversation never comes off the wall. I may honestly find the most plot-necessary material in this story the least compelling, by which I mean the scenes with earnest rookie Deputy Katz (Jeremy Glazer), long-time good ol' boy Sheriff O'Doyle (Sean O'Bryan), and no-nonsense State Police Commander Slattery (John Marshall Jones); they are well-acted and they build texture into this effectively seven-character world, but their moves are more familiar than anything that passes between Lowell and Sawyer or even Lowell, Holly, and Buck. At least they look good, lensed like the rest of this natural-lit production with a refreshing scarcity of shaky-cam by Michelle Lawler, who can make the fall-stripped forest look bleak, beautiful, homey, and Grimm by turns. I am also fond of the score by H. Scott Salinas which sounds like eerie winter folk, scrap-metal fiddles and singing ice. Mostly what I can evaluate about the art direction by Priyanka Guterres and the costume design by Alexis Scott is that it aids the feral, autumnal, granite-and-blood-nailed atmosphere of the movie, like being swallowed up by the wilderness of American myth, huger and wilder and more intricate on the inside than it looked from the treeline. If you are noting a preponderance of female names in this crew, it looks like a conscious attempt at parity on the part of the production company; perhaps that explains the low dose of sexual violence in a subgenre whose narrative tropes all but budget for it. Grab-ass, yes, rape, no. The threat of being murdered for something you may not even have seen is plot momentum enough. Since I have a habit of taxonomies or at least double features, this movie aligns itself in my head with other indie thrillers like Mohawk (2017) and Small Town Crime (2017); it would be unfair on both sides to describe it as the exploitation version of Winter's Bone (2010), but I will if it gets people interested enough to rent or stream it. It runs 108 minutes and could maybe have been shorter, but I like how it hangs out in the small beats, where there's room for hope and fear to bloom. Sawyer palming a bradawl. Lowell shrugging, "Can't cook heroin." How casually and centrally the river idles through the mise-en-scène, taking its color from iron clay, red phosphorus, blood. I suspect it is even a good Thanksgiving movie, if you're looking for one. This change brought to you by my different backers at Patreon.
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