By focusing on Seattle and expensive retreats like the San Juan Islands, Lynn Shelton’s movies—like 2009’s Humpday, 2013’s Touchy Feely, and 2014’s Laggies—capture a particular cross-section of the Pacific Northwest. Maybe because I grew up in it, I love it—but it ignores the expansive gloominess and washed-up beauty of rural and suburban Washington. That’s a shame, because they’re as much a part of the state as Seattle, a city increasingly dominated by such misfortunes as Jeff Bezos’s inexplicable glass testicles.
So I was pleasantly surprised by Shelton’s latest, Outside In, filmed in suburban Granite Falls and Snohomish County—locales that are Bezos-free (for now) and captured in all their rainy, tree-sheltered, moss-flecked glory. The subject matter, too, is more urgent than Shelton’s usual fare: Outside In focuses on a subtext-heavy friendship between a high-school teacher, Carol (Edie Falco), and Chris (Jay Duplass), the 38-year-old former student she helped parole from the Walla Walla State Penitentiary after a 20-year sentence.