To say that is set in is technically true but also a wild understatement. The stark and unsettling beauty of West Texas, with its cliffs and canyons and ghost towns, isn’t mere backdrop to this well-observed drama; it infuses the movie on a molecular level. ’s atmospheric feature — which has begun its theatrical journey a couple of years after playing the fest circuit — revolves around a holiday get-together that proves anything but relaxing for two couples and their school-age kids.

With its mixture of laid-back intimacy and stressed-out intensity, the story pushes the characters out of their not-so-comfortable comfort zones and into an uncharted territory that’s variously tantalizing, terrifying and forgiving. The pull of mystery and adventure is there from the get-go, in the traveling shot that opens the film: a view through the windshield of a car moving down a two-lane highway. The travelers are married New Jerseyites Cory ( , of ) and Melanie ( , ), in a rented SUV with their girls (Zoë Wagner and Delilah Wagner, the helmer’s daughters).

They’re on their way to visit friends who have renovated an adobe on 20 acres of cactus and scrub. The expanse of the Lone Star state that unwinds before them (a region that figures significantly in the final stretches of the Lily Gladstone indie ) suggests a permeable border between the alluring and the precarious, a collision of dreamscape and the everyday that’s a defining quality of Wagner’s film. Stopping to adm.