You know that scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, when they're in Moria and have just stumbled upon the tomb of Balin, and Gandalf is reading aloud from the book they found there, and just as he finishes Pippin tweaks the arrow in a dead body and sends it clanging down a shaft and alerting the orcs to their presence? Well, the tension of that exact moment – the two seconds between Gandalf saying "They are coming" and Pippin acting like a fool of a Took – about sums up Meek's Cutoff: lasting dread, unrelaxed, persistent and with no end in sight. It's bloody brilliant.

And I'm not going to elaborate any more than that....

Stray thoughts:

• Okay, some elaboration, then. The film is unquestionably a western, but the setting is highly unusual for the genre: the desert of eastern Oregon in the 1840s.

• The movie's greatest strength is its love of its characters. These are flesh-and-blood humans, driven by practical necessities and simple courage. The closest we get to a villain is Stephen Meek, the guide who is leading the travelers on their sojourn, yet he comes across more as incompetent than malicious. The rest vary in type, but all are lovingly spun, rational, and get moments in the spotlight.

• On that note, Meek's Cutoff put me in mind of Krzysztof Kieślowski's wonderful Dekalog series. Those were similarly inhabited by characters who ran the gamut of personality types, but were nearly all just people trying to get by in life. The same is true here.

• There really was a historical Stephen Meek, and he really did lead a wagon train on the trail shown here. Today that trail is called the Meek Cutoff. The true story, which I read about after seeing the movie, is way grimmer than what's shown here. The real party consisted of about 1,000 people, of which a few dozen perished. That is significantly different from what happens in the film, but in my opinion the script's decision not to depict historical reality is a smart one. A story of that scale could've easily gotten mired in scope. Instead, we get a story that cares very little about the mechanics and directs its energy into developing its characters.

• I know I keep coming back to the characters, so I'll highlight the cinematography here. The landscapes are gorgeously captured, of course, but what stood out to me were the scenes shot in low light. Combined with the tight aspect ratio, the nighttime scenes are very effective at making you feel constrained. It made me identify more strongly with the characters, as it reflected the limitations in whatever choices they made. Very evocative.

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Added to lists:

Films With Perfect Endings
The Best Films I Saw in 2022