There is nothing in this film but cinematography. The story is predictable (rural gothic), and the acting simply fails to make it through, to survive the dazzling cinematography, which at times goes too far—it's fair to play with lens and focus; it's unfair to outright blur the edges of an image. The film is set during the Great Depression and concerns a dirt-poor family—ma, pa, big boy, little boy, sex-starved daughter. There is no work in the city and no food in the forest. What the family has plenty of, it can't put into its stomach—insects, reptiles, sunlight, and trees. In one scene, the sex-starved daughter ("too much devil in her") has sex with the trunk of a huge tree.

The film is not about starvation, but rather the father's obsession with his beautiful daughter (Lucy Adden). This is exactly where the film falls apart—the culminating scene of the crime. Before this point, the dark moment of Lot, we have been in Malick land (particularly Days of Heaven); after it, we suddenly enter Tarkovsky's territory (the scene in The Mirror when the wind knocks over a table with a bowl of milk, or in The Sacrifice when the professor sleeps with the witch). But there's no metaphysics or sacrifice in Redland. We see only a crime that will go unreported. And this is a politically regressive view of poverty. It is not represented as oppressive (Wall Street corruption and exploitation), but as a kind of release from the limits of society. It's a freedom that unleashes the "dark forces" of the family.

The belief is that only the poor and the very rich (Chinatown) have access to this dark and ugly freedom. Why? Because to be in one or the other extreme state is to be seen as above or below politics, the art of living with other humans. But there is no such hiding place: We are all in the middle; we are always already political.

Northwest Film Forum, Fri-Sun 7, 9:15 pm, Mon 9:15 pm, Tues 7, 9:15 pm.