This Western Thriller On Prime Video Feels Like ‘The Shining’ Meets ‘Oregon Trail’
Boring? Or actually just underrated.
The minimalist, harrowing drama Meek’s Cutoff is probably best known for igniting a debate about art and entertainment when NY Times Magazine’s Dan Kois labeled it as boring and cited watching it as an example of “eating your cultural vegetables” (i.e., something that you do out of a need to prove your sophistication, rather than for pleasure).
While the debate had merit, using Meek’s Cutoff as a central example of an overcooked cultural vegetable was misguided—chiefly because, well, the film isn’t boring. It’s slow-moving and sparse, but it’s also terrifying, intense, and taut, forcing you to consider the pioneer experience in ways you never really wanted to.
Meek’s Cutoff is kind of like the classic computer game Oregon Trail, except crossed with The Shining. Instead of laughing when your pioneer family gets lost and the wagon breaks a wheel, the movie makes you realize the utter horror of wandering hopelessly across barren terrain with some other family that you’re starting to view less as companions and more as potential brunch.
Perhaps this professional film critic can convince you:
“Beyond that, Meek’s Cutoff is a film that works masterfully with space, time and history. You could call it a thriller or horror movie in extreme slow motion, or a parable that’s more about 2010 than 1845. At various moments it recalls Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and those verses from the Old Testament. No doubt it would bore many people silly, but its mood of desolation, danger and desperate faith affected me more powerfully than anything else I saw amid the onslaught of cinema at Toronto this year.”—Andrew O’Hehir, Salon
If you’ve never seen Meek’s Cutoff, I’d encourage you to experience it for yourself. It’s a haunting, unforgettable take on survival and the human spirit—a film that lingers like the desert’s oppressive silence.
