Written and Directed by: Matt Ross
Premiered at Sundance 2016.
Streaming on Prime Video.
It's a beautiful premise. It's about a family who lives in isolation from the real world, with anti-capitalist ideologies and some idealistic ways of living. They hunt their own food, they are extremely physically active, they never lie to their children even when they ask questions about things that are usually considered inappropriate for them. This family is forced to come into the real world. It's a 'fish out of the pond' scenario, like Dictator, PK and such films where the protagonist is so out of sync with the world that everything can be a conflict. They use this very well too. They are constantly questioned about their way of life and the father proves themselves right every single time. The film is shot beautifully, the performances are good too.
My issue with the film was that the film's worldview wasn't clear. It was shifting from here and there. The film ends on a note where you have to strike a balance. But the film at the end of Act 2 goes to a zone where the father too stops to believe that his ways are correct - well this could be the writer applying the 'all is lost' moment but then this ended up in the film not having a strong worldview. It doesn't take a stance. Sure, ending the film where the characters strike a balance is alright but here the characters surrender to the ideas of capitalism, which felt a little disappointing because at least in a film you crave to see characters do things that perhaps you cannot. I didn't like the track of the mother's death too, because they conveniently kept peeling layers out of that track according to whichever side they wanted to take.
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