Now that it's finally watchable by us peons this has been getting a lot of renewed attention and strong Oscar buzz. Zhao clearly has a knack for exploring and showing sides of America that aren't often displayed on the screen, efficiently using mostly non-professional actors (outside of McDormand obvs; it's almost distracting when David Strathairn shows up) to give this a quasi-documentary feel. There are many shots of McDormand's character Fern traipsing through empty locales and stunning scenery, highlighting the kind of luminous open-lensing that was so effective in The Rider.

Based on a 2017 book about wandering (white) seniors who embrace the mobile life at the twilight of their working lives, using seasonal work at Amazon or during crops to make ends meet. I haven't read the book though I get the sense that this movie takes a lot more subdued approach to showing the systemic failures brought on by late-capitalism. It does show that this isn't an easy life, but it seems to balance it with a near-paean to rugged individualism that Fern constantly embodies. Maybe that's the limitation of fitting such topics in a 100min movie, but I thought the end message was a bit muddled. Zhao deserves all the acclaim she gets as potential future great, but I thought it was interesting that this movie, made at the tail-end of the Trump era, was so apolitical, or at least worked so hard to sand off those edges and making the film a sort of a blank slate. Clearly The Eternals and Dracula won't answer the question of how far Zhao is willing to keep digging through the American psyche (though it would be kind of amazing it they did), but it'll be fascinating to see if she will want, and manage, to keep fitting these indie projects in between tentpole work