Preview: East of Wall

It’s partly fact, partly fiction  — and judging from the response it received earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, altogether fascinating.

Filmmaker Kate Beecroft’s East of Wall, which Sony Pictures Classics will open theatrically on August 15, won the Audience Award at Sundance, and captivated critics at the festival as well. It’s been described as an intimate look at a marginalized, neglected corner of the American West, with horse ranchers Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga, and members of their extended makeshift family, playing versions of themselves.

According to Sony Pictures Classics, East of Wall is “an authentic portrait of female resilience ... inspired and played by the women and girls who live it. Set in the Badlands of South Dakota, Tabatha, a young, rebellious rancher, who rescues and resells horses, must make hard decisions to deal with her fractured family, financial uncertainty, and unresolved grief, all while providing refuge for a group of wayward neighborhood teens.”

East of Wall currently has a 100 Percent Fresh rating on the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregate site. Among the critics who have raved about the film:

Peter Debruge of Variety: “So much of the American cowboy mythos — the way they talk, the silhouette they cut, the clothes they wear — has been codified, if not invented wholesale, by Hollywood. From first shot to last, Kate Beecroft’s East of Wall  expands our perception of those iconic horse wranglers to consider the women so often overlooked. In the tradition of Chloé Zhao’s The Rider, this eye-opening 21st-century Western was inspired by real people: Debuting writer-director Beecroft convinced the Zimiga family — most notably single mom Tabatha and her daughter, Porshia, a TikTok star and rodeo queen — to participate in a drama extrapolated from their own lives, all but rewriting the genre with the result...

“Beecroft derives unquantifiably rich scenic value from the stunning South Dakota backdrops, whether handheld shots of magic-hour vistas or weightless drone shots through the vast, corrugated folds of the Badlands. But it’s the tough, sun-blasted faces of her largely nonprofessional cast that lend East of Wall the sense of raw, lived-in experience that sets Beecroft’s yearslong project apart. The helmer rounds out the ensemble with stars Jennifer Ehle and Scoot McNary, who are convincing enough as the moonshine-brewing grandma and deep-pocketed Texas rancher, respectively. And yet, while you can teach an actor to drawl, spit tobacco and ride a horse, those shots of Porshia bolting across the horizon faster than her mom’s pickup truck can keep up … well, there’s just no faking that.”

Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter: “Tapping into universal tensions with a charged specificity, East of Wall is vibrant with its sense of place and, beneath its hard-knocks surface, a poetry of astonishment and yearning, emotions intertwined in the subtle but stirring score by Lukas Frank and Daniel Meyer-O’Keeffe. The place Beecroft stumbled upon is fueled by girl power, and the story she and her collaborators have created is wise and messy, keenly aware of the dark places at the margins as it burns bright with life.”

Harrison Richlin, IndieWire: “Offering further context for Tabatha’s state of mind is her mother Tracey, a dirt-covered, chain-smoking, moonshine-swilling sage played by none other than character actress Jennifer Ehle. The daughter of classically trained thespian Rosemary Harris and herself an alumnus of the Royal School of Speech and Drama in London — Beecroft’s alma mater as well — Ehle has become known as a portrayer of serious, put-together figures in films like The King’s Speech and Zero Dark Thirty, as well as miniseries like Pride and Prejudice (1995) and The Looming Tower. In East of Wall however, Ehle embraces her feral side, playing Tabatha’s mother with a raucous zeal that explodes off the screen, creating a character that offers both comic relief and tremendous emotional pathos.

“The other well-known talent lending their star power to the film is Scoot McNairy, who plays a well-off Texas horse trainer looking to build new profit in the Badlands. McNairy’s tough, white, male energy contrasts greatly with the quiet pain and subtle pride Tabatha and Porshia exude, but is vital to understanding the conflicts these two face as women trying to prove themselves in what is presented to them as a man’s world.”