Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women is less a film and more a series of emotional stalemates dressed in earth tones. It’s three loosely connected stories about women drifting through wintry Montana landscapes with the energy of someone who just drank chamomile tea and remembered they have jury duty. There’s no climax, no payoff, and no pulse—just a slow, gray slide into existential resignation.
If you’re a fan of cinematic stillness, psychological repression, and long scenes where characters contemplate drywall while saying nothing, congratulations—you’re the target audience. For the rest of us, Certain Women feels like being trapped in a dentist’s waiting room inside the mind of someone who forgot how to feel joy.
🛷 Plot: Three Stories, No Momentum
Reichardt adapts stories from Maile Meloy into a triptych of female longing, miscommunication, and vague discontent. Sounds compelling, right? Don’t worry, it isn’t.
Story One: Laura Dern plays a lawyer who’s been gaslit into hell by a delusional client (Jared Harris). She spends most of the segment looking tired, giving legal advice no one listens to, and trying not to scream while navigating the spiritual void of Billings, Montana. It ends the way all stories about Laura Dern and delusional men should: with resignation and a thousand-yard stare.
Story Two: Michelle Williams plays a woman who wants to build a dream home out of reclaimed sandstone. That’s not a metaphor—she literally wants old rocks. She drags her husband and stoned teenage daughter on a passive-aggressive journey to manipulate an old man out of a pile of bricks. This is the closest the film gets to a heist plot, and it’s about as thrilling as watching someone argue over mulch at Home Depot.
Story Three: Kristen Stewart plays a stressed-out law grad who accidentally starts teaching a night class in a town she didn’t know existed. Lily Gladstone plays a lonely ranch hand who shows up to class every week, looking like a puppy watching its owner pack for vacation. They form a quiet, painful connection that’s never spoken aloud and ends with a shrug so big it might have dislocated a shoulder.
🧍 Characters: Women on the Verge of a Very Quiet Breakdown
Every woman in Certain Women looks like they’ve been awake since 4 a.m. and haven’t had a full conversation since Obama’s first term. They communicate in glances, sighs, and unfinished sentences. They’re not just emotionally repressed—they’re emotionally evaporated.
Laura Dern’s character is the only one who occasionally raises her voice above “numb therapist,” and even that feels like a cry for help from a hostage video. Michelle Williams floats through her scenes like an ice cube left in a puddle—slowly melting into a state of complete detachment. Kristen Stewart plays herself, as usual, which works perfectly because nothing says “quiet emotional implosion” like her patented dead-eyed grimace.
Lily Gladstone deserves praise for conveying so much longing with so little dialogue, but the film does her dirty. Her story ends not with heartbreak, but with a faint “meh” that echoes through the mountains like a dying echo of an emotion that never arrived.
🎙️ Dialogue: More Gaps Than a Toothless Choir
The screenplay is like a conversation with someone who’s halfway into a nap. There’s no urgency. No rhythm. Every exchange feels like it’s happening underwater. Characters speak in sentence fragments like they’re trying to avoid accidentally revealing anything personal—ever.
Example:
“I thought I’d… I guess I thought it might be…”
“I know.”
[Four seconds of silence]
“Okay.”
[Fade to gray]
It’s not that Reichardt can’t write dialogue—it’s that she chooses not to. Instead, she prefers the awkward poetry of the unsaid. That’s great for MFA workshops. Less great for a 107-minute film that could’ve just been a series of emails with no attachments.
🖼️ Cinematography: Beautiful Sad Beige™
Shot in 16mm and framed like melancholy postcards, Certain Women is Reichardt’s ode to Montana’s emotional tundra. Every frame looks like it should be hanging in a gallery called “Depressed Minimalism: A Study in Beige.” The color palette includes muted grays, sad yellows, and the exact shade of a cold hard-boiled egg.
But make no mistake—the visual poetry is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Without it, the film would collapse under the weight of its own emotional anemia.
🧠 Themes: Isolation, Longing, and Emotional Constipation
The film is clearly about the quiet tragedies of being ignored, misunderstood, or slowly erased by life’s compromises. It’s about women stuck between what they want and what they settle for. In theory, that’s rich ground. In practice, it’s like trying to plant corn in frozen sand.
Each story has potential, but Reichardt flattens them into meditative vignettes where nothing blooms. Instead of insight, we get stillness. Instead of catharsis, we get the emotional equivalent of that moment when you wave at someone and they don’t wave back.
💤 Pacing: The Art of Almost Falling Asleep
If you’ve ever watched a tumbleweed roll in real time, you already understand the pacing. The film lingers on silence like it’s charging rent. Scenes end long after their emotional expiration date, and transitions between stories feel like being slowly lowered into a sensory deprivation tank filled with lukewarm oatmeal.
If this movie were a beverage, it would be chamomile tea you forgot to steep. If it were a sound, it would be a librarian sighing in a snowstorm.
🔚 Ending: Not So Much an Ending as a Fizzle
The movie concludes with each character mildly disappointed, vaguely reflective, and still wearing the same muted outfit they started in. Nothing is resolved. Nothing explodes. Nothing grows. It’s like someone quietly pulling the plug on a lava lamp.
Kristen Stewart drives away. Michelle Williams stacks rocks. Laura Dern goes back to work. Lily Gladstone stares off into space and somehow breaks your heart… except Reichardt refuses to let it land.
📋 Final Verdict: Women Deserve Better. So Do We.
Certain Women is a film about longing, isolation, and quietly suffocating under the weight of unspoken grief. And yes, in the right hands, that can be moving. But this isn’t just “quiet cinema”—it’s emotionally sedated cinema. Reichardt doesn’t whisper. She mumbles into a void and dares you to pretend it’s profound.
If you want to see a film about women that actually says something, look elsewhere. If you want to stare at the cold spaces between words for two hours while nothing happens—well, here’s your beige banquet.
TL;DR
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Plot: Three women endure soft tragedies in slow motion
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Characters: Miserable, mute, emotionally marinated
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Dialogue: Mumbled fragments of broken dreams
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Pacing: Measured in sighs per scene
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Aesthetic: Montana, if it were a muted Spotify playlist
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 law classes taught by accident
Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women is a love letter to restraint—and like most unread love letters, it ends up in a drawer, forgotten, and slightly damp.
