‘The Unknown Country’ Review: A Granddaughter’s Road Trip

Snow-bordered highways, a cat winking its jade eye, the tentative but at all times observant expressions of the primary character Tana (Lily Gladstone) are among the many low-key pleasures of “The Unknown Country,” the director-writer Morrisa Maltz’s luminously photographed, delicately paced highway film.

After the dying of her grandmother, whom she cared for, Tana accepts an invite to attend her cousin’s wedding ceremony in South Dakota. She hasn’t been along with her Oglala Lakota household since she was eight.

Tana’s wintry drive from Minneapolis to her cousin Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux’s in Spearfish, S.D., is simply the primary leg in a journey that can take her to the Pine Ridge Reservation and southward to Texas, as she traces an itinerary taken from her grandmother’s photograph album. One image exhibits Tana’s grandmother as a younger lady, a craggy vista within the distance, and discovering the place the photograph was taken begins to form Tana’s sojourn.

Shangreaux, her husband, Devin, and their daughter, Jasmine, are among the many performers right here portraying themselves. In the movie’s most ingenious, gently disruptive gesture, the nonprofessional forged members’ precise tales are recounted of their voice-overs. Think of those mini-documentary profiles — of a waitress (Pam Richter), a fuel station attendant (Dale Leander Toller), a motor lodge proprietor (Scott Stampe), and the nonagenarian Florence R. Perrin, a two-stepping mainstay on the Western Kountry Klub in Midlothian, Texas, as relaxation stops in Tana’s journey.

Gladstone, who stars in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon,” delivers a efficiency that’s hushed and anchoring. But the movie’s light detours into the real-life tales remind us that it’s the folks met on the highway that so usually make the journey memorable.

The Unknown Country
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters.