Set against the unforgiving landscapes of rural Montana, Certain Women unfolds across three loosely connected vignettes, capturing the quiet exhaustion and unspoken frustrations of everyday life.

A small-town lawyer (Laura Dern) navigates the end of a romantic affair while facing an obstinate client who refuses her counsel. Elsewhere, Gina (Michelle Williams) struggles to assert herself within a marriage that continually undermines her authority and sense of self. In the final act, ranch hand Jamie (Lily Gladstone) forms a tentative bond with her night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart), awakening the feeling that there’s something more between them.

A masterclass in cinematic restraint, Certain Women resists resolution, allowing the snapshot stories to remain deliberately open-ended. By focusing on the small day-to-day disappointments, Reichardt is able to speak about bigger societal issues of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and homophobia. Moving through snow-dusted towns and bare, wintry forests, the women are bound by their stoicism, isolation, and the weight of lives lived just below the surface.

Seasonal Affective Cinema is a quarterly film club screening movies that aesthetically and thematically reflect the changing of the seasons.
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