Review of Leave No Trace (2018) by Nick P — 07 Aug 2018

I really wanted to like this movie as I enjoyed A Winter's Bone. Leave No Trace is nicely shot and well directed, visually. But this movie suffers because of its story in what otherwise could have been a great movie.

The film's plot is generally undefined and meandering the whole way through with it's main characters reacting to situations they encounter with them never developing enough and being proactive like we'd expect. This becomes repetitive and predicable like someone telling you a story of things that happened back to back but never getting to the point. One explanation for this may be because this film was adapted from a novel/true story and the writer/director wanted to remain faithful to the original. Further, the stakes are never high enough in this film to get the emotions going. Emotions, you know, the reason why we go to the movies in the first place. The main characters never have enough to lose embedded within the story to make it dramatic, and it makes the film appear flat.

You could say that maybe towards the end when the girl coincidentally finds her father in the woods unconscious from injuring himself is dramatic enough. But again, it's a situation, and not really part of the bigger theme. He bounces back in the next scene and is not that big of a deal in the film, strangely. I realize writing this now that the storytellers included that situation as a MacGuffin! The father getting injured is not essential to the film's overarching themes but they needed the main characters to be rescued, go once again out of the woods and into another civilized place to live so the film could once again show the father's desire to live off the grid in the woods. Yes, he packs up again and goes back into the woods for the third time.

The acting was good and I have greatly enjoyed Ben Foster's performances in other films. But I found the main characters too rigid and reserved and believe this was done by design to make them appear more emotionally closed off to go along with the father dealing with PTSD, history of loss with his wife/her mother etc. Though, it appeared a bit disingenuous and somewhat unnatural.

One general thing that I found odd was that the story seemed to jump back and forth between being about the father and then about the daughter without clearly cluing us in early enough with who this film is really about until the end when the daughter makes the decision to part ways from her father because he wants to live in the woods and she now refuses. The film is about her, the theme being that the daughter didn't have a sense of a stable home because her father was going through mental issues.

I found a lack of clarity about who this film is really about and from which character's perspective. Simply, who is the protagonist? The story seems to jump back and forth between being about the father dealing with his mental issues and then about the daughter longing for a normal life.

People may assume that I just didn't get it. I don't believe that's the case here. I understand it's an independent type of movie but it felt like a passion project and lacking the cohesion that would have made this a fantastic film.