Leave No Trace review: irresistible tale of one man's attempt to escape modern life

Dir: Debra Granik. Starring: Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie, Jeff Kober, Dale Dickey. Cert 15, 110 mins

Disappearing in America has got to be easier than in most places, and yet it’s a perpetual problem for the father and daughter in Leave No Trace. This pair have nothing to escape from, except a society with which they feel no kinship. They are not runaways so much as refuseniks, spurning the conventions of domestic life, and fending for themselves, in the public woods surrounding Portland, Oregon.

Will, played by the increasingly indispensable Ben Foster, and Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), a girl in her late teens, begin the film foraging and hunkering down, as they always do, around a campfire with no one else in sight. Practicality is hardwired into them, and they speak little, respecting the tranquillity of their environment and busying themselves only with the bare necessities.

They’re managing, but they find perfect solitude hard to achieve. A forestry crew barge in, chainsawing all around them, and authorities prowl the woodland, on the hunt for trespassers just like them. Over the course of the film, they’re uprooted, detained, escape again, and turn to a rustic community when in particularly dire need.

The question is whether Tom will actively seek independence from her restless and wilful father, making a break for a safer lifestyle, or whether the father will voluntarily allow her the freedom to go her own way. 

The writer-director, Debra Granik, launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career with her 2010 drama Winter’s Bone, a hardscrabble test of J.Law’s mettle in the Ozarks that came laced with local friction and threat. In Leave No Trace, on the other hand, there’s hardly anyone you could honestly call an antagonist.

Will and Tom, especially Will, have pitted themselves against the noise and stress of contemporary America, but they get no hostility back from it – just open bafflement and a degree of concern. Besides, he is committed to giving Tom a general education beyond all that woodsmanship, and she’s an apt pupil, hoovering up nuggets of information every day from an encyclopedia.

When they’re taken into custody, Will has to submit to a computerised psych-evaluation, which heads straight for trigger questions about his religious beliefs, as if it’s impossible to believe that anyone might renounce modern life without being some kind of terrorist. The welfare officer concedes, touchingly and with admiration, that Will has done a beautiful job raising Tom, but there’s nothing anyone can do to realign his ideology: he’s dead set on doing it his way.

Foster, often such a livewire and deserving of serious plaudits here, gives one of his gentlest, most introspective, and beardiest performances, but there’s a stubborn intractability beneath, an itch that won’t go away.

Meanwhile, if further proof were needed that Granik is a dab hand at coaxing revelations from young actresses, McKenzie – a gifted Kiwi previously best-known for her tiny role in the last Hobbit film – supplies this in spades. The script makes it perfectly clear what difficulties Tom has speaking up for herself, but it’s clearer still in her performance, all pent-up anxiety and bottled but welling emotion.

In one pregnant scene, she’s shown the rudiments of beekeeping – not by her dad, but a benign stranger – and learns to overcome the fear reflex. When she later shows Will her findings, removing protection and letting bees crawl all over her hands, it’s an epiphanic moment combining paternal pride, a show of filial independence, and a hopeful pointer towards different – maybe even separate – modes of survival.

Subtle but assured to the end, Granik’s film is all undertow, but it irresistibly grabs you.