All of director Kelly Reichardt's movies have made great use of silence. The extended trip to an outdoor sauna in
Old Joy immediately leaps to my mind as a great example of this. Ditto the quiet endings of
Meek's Cutoff and
Leaves of Grass that eschew dialogue to allow the audience to fully absorb the entire movie. In her 2016 feature film
Certain Women, a hushed quality washes over the proceedings even when characters are trading lines of dialogue. Everyone in this movie is plagued by some kind of woe that they've lived with for so long that they deal with it in subdued terms. Even a situation where a man holds another man hostage at gunpoint doesn't feature so much as somebody raising their voices.
For the character
Certain Women, what's the point of yelling? Doing that in the face of their anguish would be like throwing a pebble at a tank. Writer/director Kelly Reichardt communicates this idea in a haunting fashion throughout the trio of stories that
Certain Women explores. A hundred torture porn movies with all their grisly mutilations wish they had the harrowing quality of Reichardt's filmmaking in
Certain Women.
