A Barren and Inescapable History: The American West in God’s Country

By Alec Minassian

In his feature film debut God’s Country, director Julian Higgins strikes at the troubling, morally bankrupt, and imperialist histories of the American West (dir. Julian Higgins, 2022). Through the lens of a Neo-Western thriller, Higgins and co-writer Shaye Ogbonna attempt to articulate a poignant and pessimistic view on the ways in which a country’s history of genocide and settler colonialism continue to haunt both white America and millions of minority men and women alike. In order to communicate the hopelessness and turmoil of contemporary America, a country perpetually haunted by its own history of violence, greed, and masculine impulse, Higgins balances the dual role of writer and director, establishing a somber and melodramatic tone that is expressed both on the page and on the screen. Julian Higgins blends his quiet, minimalist writing style with a bleak visual aesthetic in order to accentuate the film’s upsetting and tragic tone. In doing so, God’s Country asks audiences to reflect on their own perceptions of the American West and its history of imperialism and settler colonialism. 

God’s Country, in both its minimalist script and visual palette, expresses the futility, rage, and underlying tragedy of a Black college professor attempting to protect a space that belongs to her from forces of white masculinity that often take varying forms: her belittling and passive-aggressive colleague at the university, a hunter who clearly resents the extent to which his conflict with her has escalated, or his brother who shows no remorse for the emotional or physical violence he has enacted upon her. God’s Country is a solemn and devastating exploration of American history and it achieves this primarily in the way it is written. As a co-writer on the film’s script, Higgins worked with Shaye Ogobonna to communicate this deep sadness by way of a relatively barren and quiet script. It takes several minutes before we hear our protagonist Sandra Guidry (Thandiwe Newton) even speak and it takes several more before we uncover the reason for her forlorn attitude and posture. The script slowly and carefully gives the audience enough exposition to learn that this woman has lost her mother and reveals only enough information to sustain the emotional relationship they’ve built with her. There are several sequences in the film that play for minutes without dialogue, sometimes even without score or music from the soundtrack to supplement the images on screen. These sequences perhaps speak more to the visual language of Higgins and his cinematographer Andrew Wheeler, but they are also emblematic of the fact that a moment devoid of dialogue is not necessarily a moment devoid of information, emotion, and resonance. When there is dialogue, the words are spoken in a blunt, matter-of-fact way, and the writers refuse to indulge in the quippy, fast-paced, back-and-forth dialogue we sometimes equate with conventional Western thrillers. These various elements of the film’s script make it feel slow, quiet, and introspective. The tone, then, reflects the internal struggle of our central protagonist, who herself is reckoning with loss, sacrifice, and feeling unwelcome in the place she calls home. The writing establishes a melancholy tone, accurately and tastefully remarking on the feelings of ostracization felt by our protagonist. This sense that the emptiness and soullessness of the American West is perpetuating itself in the life of our protagonist is a powerful one that is amplified by the film’s similarly somber aesthetic sensibility. 

As director, Julian Higgins bears a large share of the responsibility of communicating the stylistic look of the film to his costume and set designers, actors, and cinematographer. His depiction of rural America is painterly and serene, but it is also a place that dominates its inhabitants and is more often than not unwelcoming to the people who occupy it. In the question and answer session following the film’s screening, Higgins talked about working closely with cinematographer Andrew Wheeler to create the sense that the country and its landscapes were an overbearing and almost frightening force for Sandra to deal with (Higgins and Ogbonna). The general mise-en-scene of these landscapes are riddled with snow, mud, rain, and fire, and each frame has an elemental and physical property that Sandra and the audience alike cannot seem to escape. The film’s freezing cold climate bleeds off the screen and makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience. Long sequences of wind rustling, trees shaking, rain pouring, or clouds gathering on the horizons build a sense of unease and tension, which is reflected both in the narrative, but also subtextually in the conversation the film is having with the history of the American West. In one of many similar sequences, Higgins’s camera drifts between harrowing landscapes illuminated only by moonlight, each frame more frightening than the last for their vastness and emptiness. Peggy Lee’s “Where or When” plays non-diegetically in the background of a conversation between Sandra and a local cop she has befriended, their words momentarily overlapping the images of these vast and desolate landscapes. The conversation touches on the beauty but underlying horror of rural America, an exchange of dialogue that alone might have been able to summarize how overbearing and frightening the American West can be. The visual expression of the landscapes further communicates the feeling that the physical world around the protagonist is encroaching upon both her and the audience’s space. In depicting this rural part of the country as such an overbearing and difficult-to-navigate place, the film is asking the audience to consider what it must feel like to be treated as “other” in the place you call home. 

The film’s exploration of the history of the American West is owed almost exclusively to its technical achievements. Its quiet and barren script reflects the moral emptiness of America’s history of violence and genocide, while the similarly somber visual aesthetic creates the sense that audience and protagonist alike are being swallowed whole by the world around them. God’s Country, by way of its muted and tragic tone, reckons with history while simultaneously proposing that it continues to perpetuate itself by encouraging predominantly white, male aggressors to occupy space that does not belong to them. Unlike conventional studio Westerns, the world of God’s Country is barren, desolate, lonely, and largely devoid of the vibrant colors and characters we associate with the genre. It is a muted depiction of a country unable to escape the violence of its own past. This reckoning builds inevitably to what is a striking explosion of violence in the film’s final moments. To Higgins and Ogbonna, those final moments were a response to the kind of injustice and cruelty enacted upon millions of men and women who resemble Sandra Guidry. 

Ultimately, God’s Country successfully builds an uneasy and somber tone that reflects the pessimism director Julian Higgins and co-writer Shaye Ogbonna feel about the history of American colonialism. In their Q and A, the two spoke extensively about the short story “Winter Light” from which the film is adapted. They consistently remarked on how their stylistic sensibilities, both as writers and visual storytellers, seemed a good fit for the kind of existential and difficult feelings they were trying to communicate in adapting the short story (Higgins and Ogbonna). For them, adapting the text meant addressing its most prescient concerns while also embellishing it with the kind of somber tone they felt was appropriate in the sociopolitical context of America in 2020. In doing so, the filmmakers were successful in striking up a conversation about the history of the American West as a force that is simultaneously barren, soulless, and morally bankrupt, while also an overbearing and inescapable part of contemporary American society. 

Works Cited

God’s Country. Directed by Julian Higgins, Written by Julian Higgins and Shaye Ogbonna, Performances by Thandiwe Newton, Jefferson White, Jeremy Bobb, and Joris Jarsky. Cold Iron Pictures and IFC Films. 2022. 

Higgins, Julian. Ogbonna, Shaye. Question and Answer Session with Leonard Maltin. University of Southern California. September 8, 2022.