Wait, you’re telling me there’s a Tubi original film that doesn’t—how do I put this—suck? Just from the look of the poster, The Thicket seems like a bad career move for Emmy-winner Peter Dinklage, an understandable one for Juliette Lewis, and an act of desperation from a director specializing in pop-star music videos.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Elliott Lester’s The Thicket is a masterstroke in pace and tone. Like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven decades prior strips away the facade of the Old West. No, Lester’s great Western trailblazer strips away the lore, presenting a ruthless and cutthroat world unlike any we’ve seen in the genre in years.
Lester’s film captures the true dangers of the frontier, pitiless to the weak. Yet no matter how tough and seasoned these characters are, everyone calls out for their mamas by the end. It’s just a matter of time.
The Thicket Review and Synopsis
The story follows siblings Jack (Blink Twice’s Levon Hawke) and Lula (The Sandman’s Esmé Creed-Miles), who lost their parents after catching an acute case of smallpox. They are off to Montana with a relative, who says their parents left them a deed to 700 acres of land. However, while trying to cross the river, they come up with a gang of murderous misfits.
Led by Cutthroat Bill (Juliette Lewis, sensational here), who murders their Uncle, takes Lula, and leaves Jack for dead. Luckily, he comes across a pair of bounty hunters, Reginald Jones (Dinklage) and an ex-slave, Eustace Howard (The Wire’s Gbenga Akinnagbe), who have his back because the money is right.
It turns out there’s a large bounty on Bill’s head. Jack tells them they can split it if they find him and save his sister before Lula becomes another notch on the bedpost of the untamed and lawless American West.
The Thicket is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by award-winning American novelist Joe R. Lansdale. Working from a screenplay by Chris Kelley (Banshee, Preacher), Lester’s film is cold and calculated. Even without reading the novel, you can imagine that the filmmakers captured Lansdale’s vision of the old frontier.
This is a minimalist, stoic Western, like a cruel, jagged edge that cuts too deep into anyone too soft to survive. This harshness is perfectly captured by cinematographer Guillermo Garza (Bayonet). The film looks and feels like the reality of a Robert Frost poem. The Thicket is cold and harsh, even lonely and resolute.
Lester’s Western evokes quiet contemplation, where the whistle of the winds holds the secrets of souls lost, never to be heard from again. Juliette Lewis’s Bill, hiding in plain sight as a man, is the embodiment of those effects on the human condition.
Is The Thicket Worth Watching?
This is the veteran actress’s best performance since Natural Born Killers. Lewis plays Bill as an iron-willed villain but manages to reveal the ominous figure’s icy vulnerability. That is why The Thicket is worth watching—because of these hidden gems. This includes, of course, Dinklage, who continues to showcase his brooding movie star turns.
Known as a passion project since 2014, the Game of Thrones actor is magnetic in the role. You cannot take your eyes off him. Dinklage’s Jones is an antihero, and with such a presence on screen, he owns every second of it. You will be bowled over by a monologue that fills in some gaps in the character’s backstory, yet he manages to provide the right touch of retorting comic relief.
There are a couple of spots where The Thicket seems to cut too quickly and gloss over important plot points—for example, locating where Lula is being held. I couldn’t stop watching comedian Andrew Schulz play a slimy, bawdy brothel owner. However, this bold and brave independent filmmaking entry brings some juice to the genre and is better than anything Kevin Costner has on the horizon.
You can watch The Thicket only in theaters on September 6th.
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