Winter's Bone

Granik’s second feature – after 2004’s Sundance directing award winner “Down To The Bone” – gets the hardened look and the foreboding feel of her rural setting just right. But while Woodrell has readers throughout the English-speaking world, this unrelieved march through squalor will still be challenged to move beyond the festival circuit despite winning the US dramatic feature competition at Sundance.

At the centre of WINTER’S BONE is Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a sullen, intrepid 17-year-old caring for her ill mother and two siblings. Her meth-cooking father has just been released from prison, and the local sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) informs her that she’ll lose the house if he skips on his bail, which seems to be exactly what he has done.

Ree sets out into a subculture of rural metham- phetamine addicts, battered women and mistrust- ful armed families to find him. At every turn she encounters backwoods omerta and violence, even from her own relatives. If this is the heartland, its life support system is a mix of illegal drugs, alcohol, and the dole, and everyone has guns.

Granik directs WINTER’S BONE as a relentlessly bleak descent into country hell that aspires to an ethnographic precision in its grotesque details. DP Michael McDonough’s cold grayish palette, shot through a Red Camera, puts an additional chill on the drama. There’s no warmth to the natural world, with the trees and landscape acting as mute witnesses to deprivation and violence.

David D’Arcy