Take Me to the River

Take Me to the River is an audacious and confident debut feature from writer/director Matt Sobel. The tense, psychosexual family drama centers around a gay Californian teen named Ryder who travels with his parents back to his grandmother’s farm in Nebraska for a family reunion. But the culture clash Ryder (and the audience) expects quickly gives way to a far more intense conflict after an unseen encounter between the young man and his nine year-old cousin Molly. 

Take Me to the River is one of those movies that require a healthy suspension of disbelief, as many individual motivations are unclear. Yet the lure of getting to the bottom of everyone’s odd behaviors is so strong the viewer can’t help but go along with the narrative’s internal logic. The simple, 84 minute movie relies mostly on its cast and the evocative cinematography by Thomas Scott Stanton to create and maintain the tension. No music, sound design, overt camera techniques, or manipulative editing is used to amp up the anxiety. The acting isn't uniformly stunning, but the strong performances are so good they more than make up for the others. 

As Ryder, Logan Miller (The Stanford Prison Experiment) maintains our sympathies and our interest despite the character’s passive nature. The gifted Robin Weigert (Calamity Jane of HBO’s Deadwood) gives the most compelling turn as Ryder’s mother who constantly shifts between overprotective and oddly detached. Josh Hamilton (Away We Go, Margaret) creates a genuinely unsettling, if not entirely tenable, character as Ryder’s menacing Uncle Keith. In the picture’s most underwritten role, Richard Schiff does an admirable job overcoming the memory many audiences still have of him as the feisty Toby Ziegler on The West Wing to convince us that he’s the type of emasculated father who would allow things to go as far as they do in this picture. And Ursula Parker (Louis CK’s younger daughter on Louie) delivers a riveting and unsettling performance as the precocious Molly.

The movie builds to a quiet climax, not the explosive resolution we might expect. This is not a typical American dysfunctional family drama like August: Osage County (2013) or Rachel Getting Married (2008), where long held secrets and resentments are uncovered through heated verbal exchanges and well articulated monologues. Take Me to the River is far more repressed and dreamlike. Information is revealed by what the characters don’t say as much as by what’s stated out loud. The picture plays more like the recent disquieting family drama from Sweden Force Majeure (2014)—both films share the same editor, Jacob Secher Schulsinge. Take Me to the River also recalls Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Smooth Talk (1985), and The Hunt (2014) in its ability to use the specifics of its environment and the powerful sexual tension created between its actors to instill a distinctive sense of foreboding, suspicion, and dread.