Meek's Cutoff

Meek's Cutoff (2011) is a western drama by Kelly Reichardt — watch online on iFILM. Three wagon families are crossing the high desert of Oregon in 1845, guided by Stephen Meek, a loudmouth frontiersman who stopped knowing where he was going a hundred miles ago. Water is nearly gone. The landscape looks the same in every direction.

Michelle Williams plays Emily, one of the settler women who reads the situation more clearly than the men will admit. When the group takes a Cayuse man captive — hoping he knows where water is — trust and suspicion split the party down the middle. Bruce Greenwood makes Meek genuinely ambiguous rather than a cartoon villain: a man whose ego keeps killing people by inches. Reichardt shot the film in boxy 1.33:1, almost without a score, letting the silence and the flat horizon do the work. Stream Meek's Cutoff (2011) on iFILM.