Robin Wright, in her feature directorial debut, plays Edee, a woman suffering a great personal loss who has come to the end of her rope. She has a sister whom she seems to be close to and is seeing a therapist, but her grief is overwhelming.
Without telling her sister, she makes an extreme decision to buy a run-down cabin in the remote Wyoming Mountains. She doesn’t want to be around any other human being. To that end, she follows the realtor in her rental car with a U-Haul filled with essentials to a cabin that looks hardly inhabitable. When she tells the realtor to have someone pick up the car and return it to Town many miles away, you can just imagine the rough time she’s about to experience.
Edee can fish, but doesn’t know how to trap or hunt or shoot, she’s ill-equipped to protect or feed herself. However, she’s so hopeless, she would almost accept death in order to end her pain.
Edee appears to finally begin to enjoy the beauty of her surroundings, when a bear breaks into the shack and eats most of her food and smashes the meager furnishings. She tries to forage in the snow-covered wild, but ultimately fails. Dehydrated and beaten up by her circumstances, she passes out on the cabin’s cold floor. However, a hunter named Miguel (Demian Bichir) is hunting in the area and notices the cabin didn’t have smoke coming from the chimney, so stops by to see if he can help. He finds Edee collapsed on the floor., close to death. He brings his sister Alawa (Sarah Dawn Pledge), a nurse to medically treat her, and Miguel stays with until she’s fully recuperated.
The feeling of encompassing sadness while surrounded by incredible beauty ( filmed in Alberta, Canada), almost works to emphasize her depression. Wright gives an emotional and deeply moving performance. Bichir is wonderful as a very caring man who’s also living with his own heavy burden. The two help each other heal in unexpected ways.