Still from The Mastermind (2025), directed by Kelly Reichardt

It’s not a coincidence that Kelly Reichardt, a filmmaker whose style is defined by a stillness that borders on paralytic, should open so many of her films with the motif of a moving vehicle: the establishing shots of trains in Certain Women (2017) and Wendy and Lucy (2008); of a cargo ship in First Cow (2019); of an ox-drawn wagon in Meek’s Cutoff (2010). If vehicles don’t feature in the opening, they nonetheless play a pivotal narrative role: Old Joy (2006) and River of Grass (1994) are road movies; The Mastermind (2025) is about a getaway driver; Night Moves (2013) takes its title from the protagonists’ motorboat.

Almost all of Reichardt’s films are preoccupied in one way or another with the contradiction of appearing to be in constant movement while in fact not moving at all. On the prominence of images of trains in her filmography, she commented, “Usually the characters are stuck somewhere, and there’s always these trains passing in and out and on the move. They’re either emotionally stuck or physically stuck, wherever they are.” Her characters are the outcasts and vagabonds of the American West, mostly poor, always lonely, free to blow about here or there, yet ultimately imprisoned by circumstance. They are the huddled masses becoming scattered, spread too far across the sparse landscapes of Montana and Oregon to find one another.

In her embrace of the doomed drifter, Reichardt is continuing a storied tradition in American cinema. The filmmakers of the New Hollywood were particularly enamoured with the archetype of the endless wanderer, who never really gets anywhere, geographically itinerant but socially immobile. But in Reichardt’s films, this figure is blanched of all romance. At least Butch Cassidy finds some freedom on the road; at least he dies an explosive, tragic, beautiful death. In Reichardt’s films, the few characters that die do so ambiguously and abjectly. Mostly, though, they live mundane, frustrating lives, without climax or relief – if the cinematic drifters of the 1960s and 1970s were going nowhere fast, Reichardt’s drifters are going nowhere very slowly.

Across nine films, Reichardt has developed a knack for inverting the orthodoxies of American genre film: road movies in which the road is stifling rather than transformative; westerns told from the perspective of women or immigrants. In Old Joy, which follows two distant friends driving to the Cascade Mountains for a camping trip, we expect the car to open up a space of intimacy and understanding between them, that the combination of proximity, time and memory might coax out a moment of reconciliation. But the moment never comes: all both men can do is fumble towards an attempt at connection that never quite lands.

Reichardt’s American-ness also stands out in the other form she is associated with: slow cinema. Her adoption of these conventions – long takes, sparse dialogue, a slowness that is less meditative than it is alienating and discomforting – seems remarkable precisely because they are so un-American. Indeed, many of the filmmakers most prominently described as slow cinema in the 21st century have hailed from the Global South – the Philippines (Lav Diaz), Thailand (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Argentina (Lisandro Alonso) – in contrast to the freewheeling bombast of their American counterparts (the Safdie brothers, Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson).

Still from Certain Women (2016), directed by Kelly Reichardt

Yet watching Reichardt’s films, one begins to wonder how we accepted these loud, crowded, larger-than-life visions as the single, definitive truth about America. After all, America is one of the least densely populated countries on the planet (with 37 people per square km), far lower than most similarly wealthy countries (the UK has 283). And it is a remarkably lonely country: a survey by the American Psychological Association found that 54% of American adults feel isolated, and 50% felt that they lacked companionship. This is the America we find in Reichardt’s work, one filled with monotonous, solitary struggle, of ordinary people suffering in silence not because they don’t wish to speak but simply because they have no one to talk to.

It seems particularly striking that as America has progressively got louder, angrier, more vitriolic over the three decades of her career, Reichardt’s work has only got quieter. In Old Joy, released in 2006, the earliest shots of a vehicle are shaky, handheld tracking shots taken from the inside of a car, following the view of Daniel London’s character as he drives through suburban Portland. In 2008’s Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt’s shots have become purposefully static, the cameras’ stillness emphasising the steady, rhythmic pulse of a train car as it rattles by. By 2016’s Certain Women, Reichardt’s camera is even more rigid. Where Wendy and Lucy cuts between several different angles of a rail yard, each about 10 seconds long, Certain Women simply opens with a single, desolate wide shot of one slow-moving train, which lasts 95 seconds.

Reichardt’s reliance on the symbol of the train is another one of her inheritances from past generations of Hollywood filmmakers: think of the train robberies featured in old westerns. So much so, indeed, that this becomes a curious anachronism. Train travel, which signified collectivity and interconnectedness, has long since ceased to be a major part of American culture, and Americans today are far more familiar with the car than the passenger train as a means of transport, as well as the atomised individualism that it represents. It seems significant that the trains in both Wendy and Lucy and Certain Women are freight trains, not fit to carry people aboard. When Wendy illegally hitches a ride on one of these trains at the end of the film, the only reason she can get away with doing so is that there is no one else on board to catch her – that which protects her also isolates her.

Even the car, that exemplar of American individualist self-mastery, does more to confine Reichardt’s characters than it does to liberate them. Where most filmmakers shoot car scenes by placing the camera inside the car, pointing slantwise at the actors, Reichardt often places the camera outside of the car, mounted atop the bonnet and pointed inwards, which means we only see her actors from behind the windshield, trapped behind glass.

Still from Meek’s Cutoff (2010), directed by Kelly Reichardt

This is particularly noticeable in the third act of Certain Women, in which Lily Gladstone’s character, a lonesome, shy ranch hand, experiences an undefined but intense infatuation with an out-of-town lawyer teaching a class at her local school. In these passages, as we follow Gladstone driving around town, the camera is in its typical place: inside the car, propped up on the dashboard or on the passenger seat. We, as the audience, can share a space of empathy with her, to sit beside her as she experiences, perhaps for the first time, the quiet surprise of an unexpected connection.

One evening, however, the lawyer doesn’t turn up to teach, and an agitated Gladstone drives four hours to her city in order to look for her. The resulting confrontation is brief, awkward and sad. As she begins the despondent drive back, all of a sudden the camera is outside the car, looking at her through the windshield. For much of the ensuing shot, which lasts almost two full minutes, we can barely see her face, or indeed anything in the car at all, shrouded by the murky grey reflection of an overcast sky, or the shadowy darkness of a tunnel. The exact moment at which her character is facing her most abject loneliness is also the moment that Reichardt places her out of reach of the viewer’s empathy.

This all assumes they can actually get in the car in the first place. In many of Reichardt’s films, actually being able to use the preferred form of transportation is a barrier in and of itself. A pivotal scene in Meek’s Cutoff sees its char acters, a group of settlers in 19th-century Oregon running desperately low on supplies, look on in despair as one of their wagons crashes into pieces at the bottom of a valley. In The Mastermind, Josh O’Connor’s character is forced to hop from Greyhound bus to Greyhound bus after having to ditch the car he used to carry out an art heist.

And in Wendy and Lucy, a film in which the car plays such a significant role that Wendy literally lives in it, we do not see her drive the car once in the entire film because, before the film has even begun, the engine has broken. Wendy, who finds herself stuck in Oregon en route to Alaska to look for work in a cannery and instead spends much of the film searching for her beloved dog Lucy, embodies Reichardt’s bitterly ironic vision of American life more than any other character in her oeuvre. She is a traveller moving halfway across the country who spends the entire film in one place, whose goals rely on a car which she spends the entire film unable to drive, and whose happiness relies on a dog who she spends almost the entire film unable to find. Though Reichardt is often described as a neorealist, she is less an American De Sica than she is an American Beckett, wryly depicting the tragicomedy of a generation of Americans waiting for a lucky break that will never come. .