The Wright stuff in a tale of off-grid survival

Cast: Robin Wright, Demián Bichir, Sarah Dawn Pledge Director: Robin Wright Duration: 1 h 29 m Available: On demand

Robin Wright began dipping her toe into directing with several episodes of House of Cards, the Netflix series in which she played a conniving political wife for several seasons.

With her starring vehicle Land, the tale of a grieving woman who seeks solace — or perhaps a form of passive suicide — by going off-grid to live in a remote Wyoming cabin, she makes her solid, if only deceptively straightforward, feature debut.

For much of the film, it isn't clear what, other than misery/misanthropy, has driven Edee (Wright) to ditch everything — cellphone, car, sister — and move into a rundown shack on the side of a mountain. Fifteen minutes or so into the story, there are hints that there was once a husband (Warren Christie) and a son (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong), who appear in the form of visions, hallucinations or perhaps simply memories.

Edee initially reveals little, other than a lack of preparedness for life in the wilderness that seems staggeringly naive. Perhaps her cluelessness is merely a measure of her staggering sorrow, but there's also a suggestion she doesn't much care about survival.

When a hunter named Miguel (Demián Bichir) comes upon her half-dead, after her larder has been ransacked by a bear and her garden has gone bust, he notes that, “Only a person who has never been hungry would think that starving is a way to die.”

The set-up is ripe for a story we've all seen before, one about a person in a self-destructive spiral of mourning, who recovers only by the intercession of a kind and patient stranger who also knows something about loss. And yet there are corners of this quiet little film that feel powerfully true, in ways that surprise.

FOCUS FEATURES Robin Wright, left, delivers a fine performance both in front of and behind the camera in Land, which co-stars Demián Bichir.