Lily Gladstone shot Fancy Dance in breaks in the filming of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. His film might be the reason why she got the gig on the fiction debut of documentarian Erica Tremblay. Or maybe not. Either way, Gladstone repays Tremblay’s compliment with a performance every bit as eye-catching as the one she gave for Mr S. They’re not dissimilar in many ways – stoic is probably the word to describe them.
What also connects the two films up is that they’re both set in the world of the Native American, and neither is going for the sentimental easy goal. There the similarities don’t exactly cease so much as stop being useful.
Director and co-writer Tremblay sets out her stall immediately, in an opening scene where Gladstone’s Jax and her young niece Roki are shown robbing a white guy who’s innocently fishing in a local stream. Jax and Roki are clearly grifters, or petty thieves, or possibly just have their eye on the main chance. What they are not is cute.
In brisk strokes we learn that Roki’s mother Tawi has gone missing, which is not particularly unusual – Jax has more or less raised her. Then the social services turn up, having somehow heard about Tawi’s absence, and set in train a series of events that will see Roki shunted off against her will to stay with grandfather Frank, played by Shea Whigham, and his new wife, Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski). Only to be sprung by Jax, the pair of them haring off in grandad’s car, searching for the missing Tawi and hoping she can be found in time for the mother and daughter dance at the annual powwow, a key cultural event in Native American and Roki’s life.
A detective thriller, a road movie and – once Roki has her first period – a coming-of-ager jostle for space alongside a gnarly portrait of life as a modern Native American. It’s a hardscrabble existence but warmly communitarian, OK but not without its downsides, most of them coming in the shape of the authorities, who aren’t doing particularly much to find Tawi, for example, but are hotly on the case once Frank and Nancy call the police to report Roki’s “abduction”.
White people may not be the enemy in this film – Frank isn’t a bad sort and childless Nancy has her own obvious motivations – but they are trouble. Whether it’s calling in social services or the “proper” cops turning up on the scene, white involvement is the nub things turn on.
Gladstone sets the tone, which is charismatically downbeat but not morose. Alongside her, Isabel Deroy-Olson sparkles away as the 13-year-old Roki – the sweet to Gladstone’s sour, the optimist in this odd coupling – while further down the cast list Ryan Begay plays reservation cop JJ, an officer who is deeply compromised and knows he’s not doing enough, even though the missing woman is his sister – a very nicely tuned performance here by Begay, who gets better in this film as he gets more to work with.
Samantha Crain’s hauntingly echoey score of wafty vocalising, humming and chanting suggests the ancestors have access to Pro Tools, obliquely raising the question about authenticity. How American Indian are the lives of the Seneca-Cayuga people, who annually put on the regalia to drum, whoop and dance, but whose lives are essentially American American? There is a sense that Tremblay and co-writer Miciana Alise (who also has a small role as a make-up artist) – both Native Americans themselves – want to engage with the whole subject and then decide that show-don’t-tell is the best policy. See also Australian aborigine director Ivan Sen’s similar approach to his flavoursome murder mysteries set in the Outback.
There are layers here, and the film is all the better for them.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
