Certain Women

Snapshot

Certain Women is Kelly Reichardt's seventh feature and her most formally austere: three loosely linked stories set in and around Livingston, Montana, adapted from short fiction by Maile Meloy. A lawyer (Laura Dern) manages a client whose workplace-injury claim has already been legally extinguished; a woman (Michelle Williams) negotiates with an elderly neighbor for a pile of sandstone she wants for the house she is building; a ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) attends a night class in school law and forms an attachment to the young lawyer teaching it (Kristen Stewart). The three narratives touch only glancingly — the lawyer's lover turns out to be the second woman's husband — and Reichardt declines the convergence that the multi-story form usually promises. What binds them instead is a condition: women at work, in a landscape and an economy indifferent to whether they are heard.

The film premiered at Sundance in January 2016 and was released in the United States by IFC Films that October. It won the top prize at the BFI London Film Festival and placed high in year-end critics' polls, and it introduced Lily Gladstone to a wider audience in a performance that critics singled out almost unanimously. It is, alongside Meek's Cutoff and First Cow, one of the central works of the American minimalist tendency that Reichardt has done more than anyone to define.

Industry & production

Certain Women was made inside the same small, durable production apparatus that has carried Reichardt's career since Old Joy (2006): the Portland-based company filmscience, with Neil Kopp, Anish Savjani, and Vincent Savino producing. Todd Haynes, a longtime friend and ally from the Portland orbit that also includes Gus Van Sant and the writer Jon Raymond, took an executive producer credit — a pattern across several Reichardt films, where his name functions less as a financing instrument than as a signal of the artistic company the film keeps.

The budget was small by any measure, and the film's economics are best understood as the specialty-distribution model of the mid-2010s working as designed: a modest, festival-validated picture acquired for a limited theatrical run and a long tail on disc and streaming. IFC Films handled the U.S. release; the Criterion Collection subsequently issued it on disc, which for a film of this scale is the durable form of distribution that matters. Precise grosses are not worth reciting even where reported — the film's commercial footprint was small and was never the point of the enterprise.

Production took place in Montana, in and around Livingston and the Gallatin and Park County corridors, in winter conditions that are visible in nearly every exterior. Reichardt's crews are famously compact, and the compactness is a working method rather than a limitation: fewer people on a location means less apparatus between the camera and the place, and it permits shooting in real houses, real diners, real stables, real parking lots, without the transformation that a larger unit would impose.

One production fact is structurally important. Every Reichardt feature from Old Joy through Showing Up, with this single exception, was written with or from source material by Jon Raymond. Certain Women is the outlier: Reichardt adapted Meloy's stories herself, drawing on "Tome" and "Native Sandstone" from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (2009) and "Travis, B." from Half in Love (2002). The title is Reichardt's, not Meloy's. Adapting three discrete short stories rather than one novel or original screenplay dictated the film's architecture in advance — it is an anthology by inheritance, not by design conceit.

Technology

The film was originated on 16mm and finished for digital distribution — a photochemical acquisition workflow at a moment when the American independent sector had almost entirely migrated to digital capture. The choice is not nostalgic decoration. Sixteen-millimeter negative in 2015 carried real operational consequences: visible grain that thickens in low light and in the flat, overcast Montana daylight the film mostly uses; short magazine loads that cap take length and discourage the long-lens, high-ratio "cover it and find it later" approach; a cost per foot that enforces discipline in coverage. Reichardt and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt built the film's texture out of those constraints rather than fighting them, and the digital intermediate and DCP finish preserve the grain structure instead of scrubbing it.

The wider technological context is worth naming. By 2016, film stock had become an elective, expensive, and slightly polemical choice, sustained by a handful of directors and a narrowed manufacturing base. For a film this size to shoot on 16mm was a statement about what kind of image the story required: one with weather in it, with the sense that the emulsion was physically present in the same cold as the actors.

Technique

Cinematography

Blauvelt, who has shot for Reichardt since Meek's Cutoff and continued through Night Moves, First Cow, and Showing Up, works here in a register of deliberate plainness. The camera is largely static or moves in slow, motivated lateral drifts; setups favor medium-wide and wide framings that keep the human figure legible within its environment rather than isolating it in close-up. Where Meek's Cutoff used a boxed 1.33:1 frame to press the wagon party against the edges of a hostile emptiness, Certain Women returns to a conventional widescreen shape, and the landscape it admits is not sublime but occupied: rail yards, mall parking, sandstone piles, a highway strip in winter.

The palette is desaturated and cold — grays, browns, sodium-lit interiors, snow that reads as tonal rather than luminous. Light sources are motivated and unglamorous: fluorescent office ceilings, a car's dome lamp, the mercury glare of a lot at night. Faces are rarely modeled for beauty. The result is a photographic register closer to the American documentary and New Topographics tradition of landscape-as-record than to the postcard West of the studio Western, and it is one of the film's central arguments: this is a place where people work.

Editing

Reichardt cuts her own films, and Certain Women is one of the clearest demonstrations of what that authorship means. Scenes begin slightly before the dramatic event and end slightly after it, holding on the residue — a car pulling away, a person standing in a doorway after the other has gone. Shot durations are long by contemporary American standards but never ostentatiously so; the film is not a stopwatch exercise in slowness so much as a refusal to accelerate.

The macro-editing decision is the more radical one. The three stories are presented sequentially, not interwoven, and the film resists the cross-cutting rhythm that the network-narrative tradition (Altman's Short Cuts, and the 1990s and 2000s films that followed it) trained audiences to expect. Reichardt withholds convergence almost entirely. The only structural join — the discovery that Laura's married lover is Gina's husband — is delivered without emphasis, as a fact you may or may not notice. A brief coda revisits each woman at her work, which is the film's idea of resolution: not that the lines meet, but that the lives continue.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Reichardt stages in real, unbeautified space, and blocks around labor. Characters are almost always doing something instrumental — driving, loading stone, feeding and watering horses, filing paperwork, mucking out a stall — and dialogue is fitted into the gaps of the task rather than the task being arranged around the dialogue. The horse work in the third story is the clearest instance: Gladstone's Jamie is seen at length performing chores in real time, so that when she rides into town the physical competence has already been established as character.

Objects carry the film's economics. The sandstone in Gina's story is simultaneously building material, a marker of authenticity she wants for her house, and an old man's last possession; the negotiation for it is conducted almost entirely in evasions, with the husband's easy male sociability doing the work Gina's directness cannot. Interiors are cluttered with the ordinary — files, mugs, tack, catalogs — and Reichardt's frames tend to include the doorways and corridors that separate people, so that conversations are frequently staged across thresholds.

Sound

The soundtrack is dominated by location ambience: wind, highway noise, freight trains, hoofbeats, the hum of an office at night, the diner's fryer and radio. Reichardt's films characteristically build environment through sound rather than through establishing shots, and here the aural landscape is what makes Montana continuous across three otherwise separate stories.

Jeff Grace, who scored Meek's Cutoff and Night Moves, provides music that is extremely sparse — a few sustained, thin figures placed at transitions and at the film's few moments of emotional escalation. Score is withheld from most of the dramatic peaks, including the sequences that a conventional treatment would swell under. Silence and room tone are treated as active choices.

Performance

The film's dominant performance mode is restraint against a scene's implicit demand for expression. Laura Dern, working against her own capacity for volatility, plays exhaustion and professional patience; her most revealing beat is the flatness with which she absorbs the news that her client believes a man because he is a man. Michelle Williams — in her third collaboration with Reichardt after Wendy and Lucy and Meek's Cutoff, before Showing Up — plays Gina as brittle, controlling, and unloved, and the film pointedly does not soften her; she is the one character permitted to be unlikeable in the way male protagonists routinely are. Jared Harris gives Fuller a wounded, childlike stubbornness that keeps the hostage sequence from becoming a thriller. Kristen Stewart plays fatigue almost to the exclusion of affect — a young lawyer commuting hours each way for a job she did not want and cannot sustain.

Lily Gladstone's performance as Jamie is the film's discovery. Almost entirely non-verbal, it works by attention: the way she watches Beth across a diner table, the slight lift of hope that is never allowed to become a declaration. The character's desire is legible and never named, and Gladstone plays both the desire and the impossibility of naming it simultaneously. It is a performance built on what Reichardt's camera does not cut away from.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Certain Women is an anthology film in structure and an ellipsis film in method. Each story is organized around an anticlimax: a hostage crisis that ends in a quiet, faintly absurd surrender; a negotiation whose success brings no satisfaction; a courtship that never becomes one. Reichardt systematically removes the beat a conventional screenplay would build toward. Fuller's siege is resolved off the emotional peak; Gina gets the stone and it changes nothing; Jamie drives through the night to find Beth and receives a response so misaligned with her feeling that the film simply lets the misalignment stand.

Causality between the segments is deliberately weak, and the film's meaning is produced by juxtaposition rather than plot. This is closer to the logic of a short-story collection than to the ensemble film — an inheritance from Meloy that Reichardt honors rather than smooths. The dramatic unit is the encounter in which one person fails to be understood by another, repeated in three registers: legal, domestic, romantic.

Genre & cycle

The film sits at the intersection of two categories it partly refuses. It is a Western by geography and iconography — ranch, horse, small town, open country — and an anti-Western by disposition, continuous with the revisionist project Reichardt undertook in Meek's Cutoff: no violence as resolution, no mastery of landscape, no myth of self-invention. The West here is a labor market.

It also belongs to the mid-2010s American independent cycle of regionally specific, slow, realist drama — a body of work that includes Chloé Zhao's early films, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone and Leave No Trace, and the wider vein of festival naturalism served by A24, IFC, and Kino Lorber. Within that cycle, Certain Women is on the austere end. And it is a women's picture in the oldest and most serious sense: a film about domestic and professional constraint, made in a form that refuses melodrama's compensations.

Authorship & method

Reichardt's authorship is unusually total for a director working at this scale. She writes (or adapts), directs, and edits; she has worked with substantially the same key collaborators for over a decade; she teaches at Bard College, which has allowed her to make films on her own schedule rather than the market's. Her career trajectory — a first feature, River of Grass (1994), followed by a twelve-year gap before Old Joy — is itself an argument about how independent careers actually work.

The key collaborators here: Christopher Blauvelt on camera, whose plain, weather-bearing photography has become the visual signature of Reichardt's late period; Jeff Grace on score, whose principal contribution is knowing when not to play; Maile Meloy as source author, whose prose economy and refusal of epiphany map almost exactly onto Reichardt's cutting instincts; Michelle Williams as recurring lead, whose four films with Reichardt constitute one of the most sustained director-actor partnerships in contemporary American cinema. The absence of Jon Raymond makes this the film in which Reichardt's own adaptive judgment is most directly exposed.

Her method is subtractive. The screenplay removes the stories' interiority; the shooting removes emphasis; the cutting removes the beat that would tell you how to feel. What remains is behavior in a place.

Movement / national cinema

Certain Women belongs to a specifically American strain of minimalism with international parentage. The lineage runs through Italian neorealism's attention to work and duration, Bresson's suppression of performance, Ozu's patience with the ordinary, and Chantal Akerman's insistence that domestic labor is a legitimate subject for cinematic time. In the American line, the essential precedent is Barbara Loden's Wanda (1970) — a film about a woman moving through a landscape of no options, shot in 16mm, refusing both judgment and rescue — along with the drift films of Monte Hellman and the regionalist New Hollywood.

Within contemporary cinema it is often grouped, imprecisely but not uselessly, with "slow cinema." Reichardt's version is distinguished by its rootedness in American class and geography: the Pacific Northwest and the Northern Rockies not as scenery but as economies. The Portland network — Reichardt, Haynes, Van Sant, Raymond — constitutes something like a regional school, and Certain Women is one of its defining works even though it was shot in Montana.

Era / period

The film is set in a contemporary present and is precisely dated by its economic texture: post-recession, service-and-extraction Montana, where a construction worker's injury claim can be extinguished by a signature he did not understand, where a law degree yields an eight-hour round-trip adjunct commute, where a ranch hand's work is seasonal and solitary. Released in October 2016, weeks before the U.S. presidential election, it was retroactively read by some critics as a portrait of a rural America that national politics had ceased to see — a reading the film neither invites nor resists, since its politics are structural rather than topical.

Themes

Work. Every story is organized around labor and its terms. The film's most consistent formal choice — holding on tasks performed in real time — is a thematic argument: that work is where these lives are actually lived.

Being unheard. Laura's client accepts from a male lawyer in ten minutes what he refused from her over months. Gina's requests are routed through her husband's charm. Jamie's feeling is never legible to its object. The film is a taxonomy of the ways women's speech is discounted, and it stages this as procedure rather than outrage.

Loneliness without pathology. Solitude is the baseline condition, not a problem to be solved. Reichardt films it without either romanticizing or diagnosing it.

Unnamed desire. The third story is one of the most affecting treatments of queer longing in recent American cinema precisely because nothing is declared. The absence of language is the subject.

Land as property and labor. Sandstone, pasture, a building site: the West here is parcels and materials, and the film's landscapes are always someone's.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception. Reviews were strongly positive from Sundance forward, with the near-universal consensus identifying Gladstone's performance and the third story as the film's summit; the Los Angeles Film Critics Association named her Best Supporting Actress, and she featured prominently in the 2016 critics' awards season. The film won the top prize at the BFI London Film Festival and appeared widely on year-end ten-best lists, including a high placement in Sight & Sound's annual critics' poll. Dissenting notices, where they appeared, made the durable objection to Reichardt's mode — that the withholding of emphasis shades into inertness, and that the first two stories are thinner than the third. That imbalance is the most common critical reservation and is not unreasonable; the film's own structure, ending on Jamie, seems half to concede it.

Influences on the film (backward). The proximate source is Maile Meloy's fiction, and through it the American short story of restrained epiphany — Carver, Munro, Richard Ford — whose refusal of resolution Reichardt translates directly into cutting. Formally, the film draws on Loden's Wanda, on Bresson and Akerman, on neorealist duration, and on Reichardt's own Meek's Cutoff for its revisionist relation to Western iconography. Photographically it stands close to the deadpan American landscape tradition associated with the New Topographics, where the West is documented as built and used rather than composed as spectacle. As a multi-story film it is best understood as a rebuttal to Short Cuts and its descendants: it takes the form and removes the machinery of coincidence that made the form popular.

Legacy (forward). Three lines of influence are traceable with reasonable confidence. First, and most concretely, the film launched Lily Gladstone, whose subsequent work — culminating in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and the Academy Award nomination that made her the first Native American woman nominated for Best Actress — is regularly dated by critics to this performance. Second, Certain Women consolidated Reichardt's position as the central figure of American minimalism, which in turn shaped the reception and financing environment for a cohort of regional realists working in adjacent territory — Chloé Zhao, Debra Granik, Nia DaCosta's Little Woods, Eliza Hittman — though affinity and a shared festival ecology explain as much here as direct influence, and the record does not support stronger claims. Third, within Reichardt's own filmography it functions as a hinge: the solo adaptation that preceded First Cow (2019), her widest critical success, and Showing Up (2022), which extends this film's interest in work as the substance of a life.

Its canonical position is still consolidating. It is taught, it is in Criterion's catalog, and it appears with increasing regularity on lists of the significant American films of the 2010s. Whether it or First Cow eventually stands as Reichardt's representative work is an open question — but Certain Women is the film in which her method is least mediated by collaboration and most nakedly itself.