Poor Jack Parker (Levon Hawke, brother of
Stranger Things' Maya Hawke) has just lost his parents to small pox when a roving band of outlaws kills his grandfather (Guy Sprung) and kidnaps his sister, Lula (Esmé Creed-Miles, Delirium of The Endless in the Netflix adaptation of
The Sandman).
The villainous gang of murderers and robbers is led by the seriously messed-up (
both physically and mentally) Cut Throat Bill (the always interesting Juliette Lewis channelling her own Mallory Knox from
Natural Born Killers and Jennifer Jason Leigh's Daisy Domergue from
The Hateful Eight), who immediately takes an 'interest' in Lula.
Seeking assistance to track down his sister, Jack recruits bounty hunter Reginald Jones (Peter Dinklage) and his sidekick Eustace Howard (Gbenga Akinnagbe), who themselves are being pursued by a posse dispatched by a former client that Jones had a justified "disagreement" with.
Along the way, Jack liberates 'trainee' prostitute Jimmy Sue (Leslie Grace), who joins their hunting party, freeing her from the oily grasp of brothel owner Hector (Andrew Schulz), a wonderfully sleazy, scenery-chewing cameo that could front his own spin-off.
Based upon Joe R Lansdale's
novel of the same name,
The Thicket is set in the snowy north of America in the early years of the 20th Century, allowing for the appearance of the occasional primitive motorised vehicle. These, however, fade from the story the deeper the protagonists push into the wilderness in their pursuit of Cut Throat Bill and her men.
Juliette Lewis is a simmering pot of madness, ready to erupt at any moment, and the pivotal scene where she and Jones face off - in conversation - across at table in a shadowy trading post on the edge of civilization is a powerful moment, clearly echoing the similar, famous, restaurant scene in
Heat.
Directed by Elliott Lester, superficially there are similarities in the story of
The Thicket to
True Grit, but the characters - most of whom are very rounded and well-developed - and the snow-covered locales are of a tonally different calibre to those seen in either Charles Portis's 1968 novel or Hollywood's two adaptations.
Ultimately, however, the plot of Chris Kelley's script for
The Thicket is (
ironically) quite thin and it's the eccentric, hard-bitten characters at the film's heart that hold the viewer's attention and fascination.
I suspect Lansdale's original 2013 novel (
which takes place, instead, in a heavily forested area in Southeast Texas) has more depth to it (
it's on my TBR list, so I hope to find out soon) and goes further into the motivations that set these events in motion.
