Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
14-year-old Joe is the only child of Jeanette and Jerry — a housewife and a golf pro — in a small town in 1960s Montana. Nearby, an uncontrolled forest fire rages close to the Canadian border, and when Jerry loses his job (and his sense of purpose) he decides to join the cause of fighting the fire, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves.
Wildlife is a quietly devastating chamber drama distinguished above all by its performances — Carey Mulligan delivers a career-best turn as Jeanette, and Jake Gyllenhaal is equally unsettling as the checked-out Jerry, with Ed Oxenbould anchoring it all as the observant teenage Joe. Paul Dano's directorial debut also shows remarkable visual confidence, with cinematographer Diego García composing images of aching stillness that echo the emotional repression on screen. The plot itself is a fairly familiar portrait of a marriage unraveling — the novel's source material keeps it grounded but not especially surprising — and the ending, though tonally consistent, resolves with a muted ambiguity that feels authentic but not especially cathartic. Novelty sits in the middle: it's a careful, controlled adaptation that perfects a certain mode of American literary cinema without dramatically reinventing it.