Leave No Trace

Leave No Trace (2018), directed by Debra Granik, is a quiet, precise drama you can watch online on iFILM. Will and his thirteen-year-old daughter Tom live off the grid in Forest Park, a nature reserve outside Portland, Oregon. They forage, keep a low profile, and avoid contact. It works — until it doesn't.

Ben Foster plays Will as a veteran for whom society produces a kind of constant low-level pain he cannot manage. Thomasin McKenzie plays Tom as a girl who loves her father completely and is also, slowly, noticing that she wants something he cannot give. When authorities find them, the separation begins — not dramatically, not all at once, but inevitably. McKenzie's performance is the kind that announces a career; she holds the emotional center of every scene she is in.

Granik made Winter's Bone in 2010 and brings the same restraint here: no villains, no easy resolutions, no characters explaining their feelings in speeches. Leave No Trace went out with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes and sat near the top of most year-end lists for 2018 — a film that earns its ending without forcing it. Stream Leave No Trace (2018) online on iFILM.