Shoebox

The scouts

It's a straightforward farm kid protects baby animals story—exactly the kind of Hallmark-adjacent premise that makes me want to scream—but Killen somehow resists every sentimental trap and lets the dread sit there instead, which is genuinely weird and I respect it.

A formally controlled study in rural American childhood that recalls the melancholic restraint of early Terrence Malick and places itself deliberately in the lineage of pastoral coming-of-age cinema; the compositional choices around negative space and the farm's geometry do the emotional labor here.

The entire film hinges on a single formal decision—shooting from Beth's eyeline so consistently that the adults become looming, fractured presences—and that one commitment to her perspective transforms what could've been saccharine into something genuinely unsettling and true.