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In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone made a deep impression with her stillness and controlled presence. This is different; in a feature debut by a Native American documentarian Erica Tremblay, Gladstone’s presentation is freer, more open, less reserved. Put simply: she overplays and gives power and substance to a dense, tangled family drama that, while perhaps anticlimactic in the final act – and too dependent on the gun plot – is fluid and sincere.
Gladstone plays Jax, living in Oklahoma Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation, trying to put his drug dealing life behind him, but still on the edge of crime. She takes care of her niece Rocky (Isabelle DeRoy-Olson) after Rocky’s mother Towie disappears, but Rocky has a fervent belief that Towie will reappear for the annual powwow where they once stole the show with the mother-daughter dance. Things are further complicated by the fact that Jax’s father is white; it’s Frank (Shea Whigham), who, after the death of Jax’s mother, has remarried Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski), a white woman.
Now, Frank and Nancy stop by Jax’s home, ostensibly to be friendly, to “check up” on her – but really, Jax suspects, to offer themselves as more suitable foster parents for young Rocky, because even though Frank and Nancy won’t say it out loud, Tawi was involved in some shady stuff that could cause her to disappear, and Jax could disappear the same way. In a way, the main theme of the film is disappearance: that kind of precarious visibility for Native American peoples that causes them to disappear without the authorities paying attention. There is pain here, but stoicism and a steely determination to survive.
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