Austin Film Festival: 'Godspeed'

It's always a relief to kick off a festival (any festival) with a seriously great film, and this tautly wound and even more tightly paced mini-epic of love, loss, and redemption deep in the heart of God's country (aka Alaska) is nothing if not awe-inspiring.

Shot with a John Ford-ian eye for sweeping natural vistas, not to mention Ford's passionately cynical humanism, Godspeed is a Northern gothic that at times seems co-written by Stephen King and Flannery O'Connor, although the only monsters lurking here are to be found deep within the charred hearts and blasted souls of three hellishly damaged human beings.

After the inexplicable murder of his wife and young son, "faith-healer" Charlie Shepherd (Joseph McKellheer) abandons the god that abandoned him only to find that uttering "Ha!" is only the beginning of His cruel joke on this particular preacher man. Retreating into the Alaskan backwoods with only an Airstream, a fishing knife, and some spirit-salving Kentucky whisky, Charlie's wholly understandable tailspin is brought to a bizarre turning point when Sarah (Courtney Halverson), the now-grown daughter of one of Charlie's old parishioners/victims, arrives out of nowhere and requests aid for another ailing family member. Less welcoming is Sarah's brother Luke (Cory Knauf), a charismatic, post-Biblical soothsayer with some black-as-sin secrets of his own.

If that sounds like a recipe for cornpone, backwoods melodrama, that's because it usually is. Director Robert Saitzyk somehow manages the impossible and completely sidesteps the usual traps inherent in such Old Testamental material (death of the first born, dangerously intimate siblings, fringe-dwelling iconoclasts with rifles) with a powerful combination of grace and fury.

There's times when the sheer Job-like woes that befall these three seem on the verge of overwhelming the entire story (after all, we're already in Alaska, so whose to say a whale won't show up?), but the cast, particularly the increasingly unhinged Knauf, is more than up to the challenge, ultimately proving that dis-organized religion is, frankly, no better and sometimes much worse than the organized kind. Either way, *Godspeed* packs a revelatory, righteous wallop.

Godspeed screens Thursday, Oct. 22, at 10pm and Saturday, Oct. 24, at 9:30pm.