Film Synopsis

In awarding Courtney Hunt the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino said of her debut feature, “It put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame.” That’s pretty significant praise from a filmmaker whose work is as hyperbolic as Hunt’s is restrained. But like her supporter, Hunt packs a wallop. Two women in upstate New York—one recently left with two sons to raise, the other a widow on the Mohawk reservation straddling the U.S./Canadian border—need money fast, and they become unlikely, uneasy and even unwilling partners in a perilous and illegal enterprise. In portraying women determined not go over the edge, Melissa Leo (Detective Howard in television’s Homicide) and Misty Upham give exquisite, hard-edged and vulnerable performances.