A stark but auspicious feature debut arrives with Nia DaCosta’s Little Woods, a tale of two sisters stuck at the bottom on the economic food chain. In the depressed Dakotan landscape, DaCosta finds a spiritual abyss for abandoned souls, with its two central women risking the law to improve their lives by marginal degrees. The film is spare, its narrative stripped to its very dry bones in quintessentially American piece of traditional storytelling. But the film’s success lies in how underneath the oppressive coldness it reveals in our society, burns a will to prevail that spites our limitations.
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