Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, here with a Slate spoiler special on Meeks Cutoff, the new Kelly Reichert film.

Joining me is John Swansberg.

Hey, John.

Hey, good to be here.

Where do we begin with Kelly Reichart's Meeks Cut Off?

I mean, I think, first of all, we should summarize the plot briefly, and then I want to talk about who Kelly Reikert is and why we were both so excited going in knowing only that title and that name.

Right. So the plot is seven people get lost in Oregon. That is the plot, right?

In what year would you say? Did they say? 1830s or 40s? I think pre-Civil War.

1845. 1845. There you go. That makes sense. But we're never in civilization, so we don't have any real cues other than that as to sort of what's going on in the world, which is an interesting part of the movie that we should maybe talk about later. But the plot essentially is there are three families of a husband, a wife, and one of the couples has a child, and they're being led through the, I guess it's the eastern portion of Oregon. They're on their way to the lush

Willamette Valley where they're going to settle and hopefully kind of make their homesteads and start a

new life. And they're being led there by this guy named Meek, where the title gets its name. So Meek

is a guide who they've hired to sort of bring them through this part of Oregon that is completely dry.

There's no water. There's no greenery. There's something to eat. So take them through that part

to the Willamette Valley where they're sell. But we're told almost nothing about their sort of the

circumstances that led them to make this journey. Like we don't know exactly where they're coming from.

I think someone mentions Virginia at some point. They're clearly from back east, but we don't really know

why they're there. Yeah. And so we're just plonked from scene one into this kind of existential

nothingness of this trip across this very dry plain. Part of it is, yeah, part of it is a very

parched, at one point they're kind of going through a place that looks sort of like those salt flats around Salt Lake City.

You know, the kind of cracked earth, the ground is almost white.

And then the blaring sun, it looks, it's pretty desert.

Like the first scene, the movie opens where they're sort of fording a river, they're filling up their water bucket. And the first thing we see before anyone even speaks is

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