Poky, low-key, somewhat parsimonious rural thriller with a simple set-up: if absent Dad, arrested for “cooking crank,” the new moonshine of the Ozarks, fails to show for his court date, the family stands to lose the house he signed over for bond, and so it falls to his eldest daughter, not to the two young ’uns or the vegetative mother, to track him down, one redneck lowlife after another. The cloak of backwoods secrecy, to say nothing of the dialect, is so thick that it’s difficult to determine where the threat might come from, or how, or why, and consequently difficult to share in the experience of the stoical seventeen-year-old who is at the center of every scene. We, far more than she, are in a figurative fog. But the atmosphere, even without literal fog, is also thick, no thanks to the greeny image or the arm-weary camerawork, and no need of the gratuitous skinning of a squirrel; and the authentic faces would appear to have been collected from the Depression photos of Dorothea Lange, including in a bit part a still recognizable Sheryl Lee, the murdered homecoming queen of Twin Peaks two decades earlier, and including, too, the angelic Jennifer Lawrence, who blends in well in the lead role and only occasionally looks as though she could be a spokesmodel for Pond’s Cold Cream. Whatever the resolution lacks in tension or excitement, it makes up in the macabre, a climax to remember. John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Lauren Sweetser; directed by Debra Granik. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd