The Rider

Chloé Zhao's film The Rider is an intriguing piece. Zhao has used untrained actors at the center of her drama of a young rodeo rider who is coping with a head injury and has been told never to ride again. The Rider is beautifully shot, has been reviewed well by many critics, and has a haunting, intriguing score by Nathan Halpern.

This is a true story, then, in many ways. The main actor in The Rider, Brady Jandreau, plays Brady Blackburn, and his dad Tim and sister Lilly play versions of themselves.

But this is The Rider's central failing, too. Because the actors aren't trained actors, the film lacks the kind of emotional pull it could have. Zhao's film is shot gorgeously, and she's given us a beautiful portrait of the Dakota land on which the Blackburns live and a set of lovely images of what it means to ride and be free and to take in the landscape on the back of a horse. But the actors can't quite drive home a scene, and the emotional impact of The Rider is stunted by the actors' inabilities to open up to the camera.

The Rider, to be sure, has lots to recommend it – particularly visually, and in a beautiful performance by Cat Clifford (who also plays a version of himself) – but it just doesn't land in the way it aims to land. This is partly a script problem and partly an actor problem, but it never quite gets where it wants to go emotionally.