Leave No Trace (2018)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Leave No Trace (2018) – D. Granik

Director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, 2010) offers a rather sombre look at the way that one veteran (Ben Foster) copes with PTSD – he goes off the grid.  The complicating factor is that he is raising a 13-year-old daughter alone (his wife presumably deceased).  Off the grid in this case is way way way off the grid – the father and daughter (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) are camping in a state park near Portland, Oregon.  They head in to the city to pick up supplies, paid for by selling the benzedrine that the father receives (but does not take) as a treatment for his symptoms.  In some ways, we might be ready to cheer this escape from the negative influences of screens and commercialism, but it soon becomes apparent that the daughter is longing for social connections with peers and perhaps mother surrogates.  Both actors do a nice job of subtly conveying their psychological profiles, although the reticence of the dad does make it harder to understand him.  Along the way, Granik shows us a host of other people who are coping with or in modern America (shown warts and all), at the lower end of the SES spectrum, possibly by choice.  It’s a thoughtful film but its resolution leaves a lot of questions hanging in the air.