“Welcome to the new West,” in which teenage rodeo riders with undercuts listen to cloud rap and horses are sold on TikTok. In East of Wall, a touching docudrama set in the South Dakotan Badlands, Tabatha Zamiga’s ranch has become home not only to wild horses and stray dogs, but also stray teenagers; kids whose home lives have crumbled like mountain schist, clinging to the ranch and Tabatha’s seemingly supernatural skill with horses.
An important thing to know upfront about the character Tabatha Zamiga is that she’s played by Tabatha Zamiga. Her daughter and co-star, Porshia, likewise plays a fictional version of herself, as do a host of other characters, a diverse set of American faces. Writer and director Kate Beecroft spent three years in the Badlands with the Zamigas, building her film around their lived experience. Filling out the central cast are a couple vets in Scoot McNairy (A Complete Unknown), who plays Roy Waters, a Texas horse farmer who drifts into their lives, and Jennifer Ehle (perhaps best remembered as the foundational screen-Elizabeth Bennett), brilliant here as Tabatha’s grungy mom, Tracey.
That two accomplished performers round out an ensemble of nearly a dozen “amateurs” casts East of Wall’s dramatic success as immediately reminiscent of Nomadland (2020), Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-winning meditation on migrant Amazon workers in the American west. But comparison doesn’t end there. Beecroft and crew use the light of South Dakota, the way it hits the land and unveils an inherent mythic quality, to find and emphasize a poetic thread running through the fractured rural life on screen — as Zhao did, and Terrence Malick before them.
Indeed, since Badlands (1973), the influence of Malick on American independent film has been unavoidable. Though other films may have marked the American cinema more immediately, Malick’s philosophy seems to have gradually defined its underlying ethos. “New Hollywood” films like Easy Rider (1969) gave American directors license to make more “European” films, eschewing classical Hollywood standards. Malick’s oeuvre, meanwhile, has given independent filmmakers the license to be Malickian, or at least to try.
At its worst, then, such imitation of Malick leads to sequences that grasp at fictionalized “core memories,” which play well on Instagram in 10 years’ time. At its best, this ethos approaches human moments, and attempts to imbue them, with transcendent simplicity. East of Wall alternately exists at both ends of this spectrum. It’s a film that is at times solemn, capturing the casual beauty of the wild landscape in its photography, or highlighting the rawness of the amateur “performances” with brusque clarity. In other moments, however, it can feel like Beecroft is seemingly trying to synthesize a style for the hypothetical “Internet Western,” splicing in TikTok clips alongside textural sequences of wanderlust and young love. The film’s style falters whenever it dips into simple montage, as if working under the assumption that atmosphere alone was enough.
When it’s at its best, however, East of Wall reverberates with the geological mythos of the Badlands, which is “crumbling and growing weaker.” Porshia Zamiga narrates these words as she rides through the dawn-soaked plains, amidst vast aerial views of the landscape, ridges twisting into the distance like brain tissue, and all of it accompanied by swelling guitars like the “Western-space music” of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (Apollo). This natural grandiosity is captured in a way that doesn’t dwarf the human story, but instead guides it. Not only does East of Wall share a landscape with Malick’s Badlands, but Porshia’s poetic voiceover seems to serve the similar function of undergirding the drifting drama here, in much the same way that Linda Manz’s does in Days of Heaven (1978), Malick’s masterpiece of Western ennui.
The looseness of the drama feels codified by the poetic imagery of the Badlands — and perhaps South Dakota, and perhaps America itself — falling apart. But Beecroft’s film — which won an Audience Award at this year’s Sundance film festival — isn’t about picking up the pieces as much as it is about finding a way to survive the enduring rubble. This gives it a spiritual strength rare amongst festival flicks featuring either unadorned trauma or unlikely reversals. The optimistic humanism of its denouement, which neither caters to easy redemption nor stoops to crass destruction, recalls that of another recent quasi-Western, National Anthem (2023). But before we get there, in the center of it all, a troubled mother-daughter relationship anchors the story, offering up a microcosm of a dysfunctional country. Both women have a way with horses, and both process grief through anger. Life on the ranch is built on and from a complex web of familial ties — some of blood, others of choice — and the intimacy of this locale only briefly shifts from the double-wide trailer and windswept pasture for short detours to visit horse auctions and rodeos.
The locus of the film’s drama rests in a handful of emotional breakages, touching, thorny scenes that at times take the idea of “performance” to its limit. The family fractures are real, at least to some degree, and captured on camera. One scene stands out: Tracey’s birthday crew, a motley group of ladies gathered in folding camp chairs, begin sharing stories, their impromptu group therapy session shaped by venting about abusive men and a broken system. Tabatha begins to speak, and cracks. Beecroft has stated that she wrote “IMPROVISED. REAL TIME” atop the scene heading, allowing Zamiga to process her grief, possibly for the first time, on camera. The ethics of this decision can be debated, alongside those in Nomadland and in many of Werner Herzog’s films, but the effect is undeniable and powerful. It’s a genuinely moving scene, and it reveals how the film has been plotted just precisely enough to allow for secrets to break it open. In this, East of Wall finds its balance between the anti-drama of Malick and the social realism of so much contemporary festival fare. Beecroft’s film delivers a careful portrait of rural America under duress, heightened but approachable, transcending its lesser parts and ensuring widespread resonance.
DIRECTOR: Kate Beecroft; CAST: Tabatha Zamiga, Porshia Zamiga, Scoot McNairy, Jennifer Ehle; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: August 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min.
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