Holler (2021)
Directed by Nicole Riegel
In a forgotten pocket of Southern Ohio where American manufacturing and opportunity are drying up, a determined young woman finds a ticket out when she is accepted to college. Alongside her older brother, Ruth Avery joins a dangerous scrap metal crew in order to pay her way. Together, they spend one brutal winter working the scrap yards during the day and stealing valuable metal from the once thriving factories by night. With her goal in sight, Ruth finds that the ultimate cost of an education for a girl like her may be more than she bargained for, and she soon finds herself torn between a promising future and the family she would leave behind.
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What critics compared Holler to
Barden's central performance is as tough and honest as the film calls for, and even if a closing riff feels slightly borrowed from "Good Will Hunting," "Holler" is a solid entry in the Midwest Desolation canon.
“Holler” is so good for so long I’m even willing to forgive the disastrous ending, which is lifted nearly shot-for-shot from “Good Will Hunting,” except with Phoebe Bridgers on the soundtrack instead of Elliott Smith.
Barbara Loden’s Wanda may have inspired Riegel to try her hand at filmmaking, but it’s hard not to watch what happens on-screen without thinking about the story beats from Good Will Hunting filtered through the gritty realism of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone .
There is an echo of Good Will Hunting , another film about a talented young person who faces economic hardship, and Riegler has no problem imitating that film’s final minutes, both in terms of resolved storylines and shot compositions.
Review: Take the aesthetic of Winter’s Bone and the scrappiness of Good Will Hunting, and you get an idea of what to expect from Holler , a solid little drama featuring a strong central performance from Barden.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Riegel’s work here is often compared to Debra Granik’s films — Holler has the gritty lower-class setting of Winter’s Bone , and Barden’s performance is reminiscent of Thomasin McKenzie’s in Leave No Trace .
Aside from the tone and social milieu in which both women work, Barden’s extraordinary performance recalls that of the equally talented Thomasin McKenzie in Granik’s Leave No Trace especially; working with these actors, both Granik and Riegel show an eye-opening capacity to understand the nuances of their young women characters, rendering complex an age-and-gender demographic far too often reduced to sexualized cliches into something far more complex and sophisticated.
Following in the footsteps of Debra Graniks’s Winter’s Bone and Leave No Trace and Nia DaCosta’s Little Woods, Riegel explores through a masterful character study how poverty impacts American women.
Granik, a filmmaker known for her minimalist and naturalistic style, all but recreated this American indie sub-genre for modern audiences, further cementing her supremacy with 2018’s achingly human Leave No Trace .