Sundance Review: Leave No Trace Finds Aching Humanity Off the Grid

Eight years ago, director Debra Granik and a then little-known actress named Jennifer Lawrence took the Sundance Film Festival by storm with Winter’s Bone. A dark, flinty little thriller, Winter’s Bone is very specific about people and place, zeroing in on poverty in the Ozarks to tell an almost mythic tale of a hardscrabble family grappling with its demons. Granik has returned to the festival this year with another film looking at an American family living on the margins, Leave No Trace. But instead of more grimness and grit, Granik’s latest offers something deeply compassionate, a story of a father and daughter that speaks truths about some large things.

Just as she did with Lawrence, Granik has found a young actress working mostly on television (in her native New Zealand) and given her a heck of a lead role in Leave No Trace, one that could mean big career things if enough people see the film. (It was received well here at Sundance, but didn’t start a fire the way Winter’s Bone did.) Thomasin McKenzie plays Tom, a teenager whose war vet father, Will (Ben Foster), is so rattled by post-traumatic stress that the only way he can cope is to live off the grid, away from the rest of the world. When we meet this resourceful, quietly loving pair, they’re living in a state park outside of Portland, Oregon, where Will teaches Tom self-sufficiency and survival skills as they forge a little life together.

From one angle, Tom seems to be doing pretty well. She’s smart, kind, engaged. But of course we know this is not really a way for a kid to live, with no real socializing and a tenuous grasp on basic things like food and shelter. The state feels the same way, removing Will and Tom from the woods and attempting to get them settled into some kind of stable situation. In this way, Leave No Trace (based on Peter Rock’s novel) seems to be setting up an us-vs.-them fight against the system, a la the similarly themed 2016 Sundance hit Captain Fantastic—or some kind of horror of exploitation. But instead, the social worker handling their case (played warmly by Dana Millican) is genuinely invested in helping the family and keeping them together. She brings them to a friendly Good Samaritan who gives Will work on his Christmas tree farm, and Tom meets a local boy who has a nice pet rabbit and does 4H.

At so many turns, you expect Leave No Trace to become dark, for the world to bear down on Will and Tom so that a point can be made about what a brutal country and time we live in. But this never happens. Granik has built a beautiful world of decent people, depicted without condescension or pity. Bad things do happen in the film, as Will, gripped by P.T.S.D., cannot see, or refuses to see, that Tom is craving stability, and instead drags her more into the wild. Yet the film handles this tough stuff with a hushed optimism—Leave No Trace is a sad film, but it’s not a fatalist one.

As far as portraits of P.T.S.D. go, it’s hard to think of one that captures it better, or more sensitively, than this film does. Granik is careful not to sensationalize Will’s condition—and thus the condition of so many in the real world—or turn it into a device. It is simply a part of his being, albeit a consuming part, one that needs no articulation beyond the measured, quiet performance given by Foster. (Here he’s eschewed a lot of the heavy mannerisms that have inflected his acting in recent years.) His anguish does not make him a monster, nor, somehow, do his many questionable parenting choices. In Leave No Trace’s terms, we both sympathize with Will and desperately want him to snap out of it. Granik is so good at staging that conflict, recognizing with sorrow and empathy that Will’s devotion maybe isn’t enough for his daughter.

McKenzie plays this dawning comprehension—this onset of autonomous young adulthood, this disentangling and distancing from a parent—with breathtakingly natural insight. She gives two specific line readings that are so spot-on, so fully realized that I found myself wondering, How does she know? She gives a preternaturally wise performance for someone her age, but never with an ounce of canned precociousness. In McKenzie and Granik’s hands, Tom is, well, a great kid, curious and thoughtful and principled. Which makes it all the more agonizing to worry for her, to watch as she yearns for a sense of home in the face of some impossible odds, under the watch of a father who in many ways is still fighting a war in a faraway country.

That yearning is central to Leave No Trace’s spirit. The film’s heartbreaking, inevitable conclusion is bitterly sad, yes. But it’s also rippled with hope—for Tom, for Will, for so many people seeking a place in the world in one way or another. Leave No Trace’s humane worldview is enriched by the film’s many loving details, its gorgeous imagery, its aching score by Dickon Hinchliffe. Granik works simply, but she doesn’t forego artistry. She’s made a film of grace and power, a story of people lost and found in America that often shows us at our noble and humble best. How rare and refreshing that is these days.

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Richard LawsonRichard Lawson is a columnist for Vanity Fair's Hollywood, reviewing film and television and covering entertainment news and gossip. He lives in New York City.