"Winter's Bone" presents a darkly tragic tale of rural life. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Deeply rural America can still feel, at its heart, like a wild country, and Debra Granik’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel “Winter’s Bone” pierces through the folklore and nostalgia of the backcountry to chronicle a stark test of survival in the Ozarks. Granik’s film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year, features direction as stoic as the protagonist. “Winter’s Bone” is beautifully bleak, a marvel because of its unflinching commitment to the relentless realism that always accompanies endurance.

“Winter’s Bone” centers around the small, drug-ridden, clannish world of southwestern Missouri, where cold, harsh people are an even more difficult force to deal with than nature itself. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a seventeen-year-old girl who takes care of her two siblings. She also takes care of her mother who has simply given up, driven into insanity or despair by her life. Ree barely scrapes together enough to keep her family afloat. She shoots and skins squirrels for soup, and relies on handouts from her next-door neighbor Sonya (Shelley Wagener). But Ree, like the other inhabitants of this bleak landscape, is proud and determined never to seem needy, a “bred and buttered” part of the Dolly clan that boasts members such as her father, Jessup, who has been serving time in prison for cooking up crystal meth, and his brother, Teardrop (John Hawkes), a former dealer and sinister coke fiend.

Ree’s precarious grasp on a livelihood begins to falter when a slick city car pulls up under her porch. When she emerges suspiciously, gun in hand, a repo man jumps out and explains that her father, who has been let out of prison on bail, has put their house up for collateral and has gone missing. If he doesn’t show up for his court date, the family must forfeit the house, and Ree’s only chances of supporting her family will be gone. Lawrence, magnificent in her portrayal of weary, iron-willed Ree, barely blinks at this news, though her stony eyes speak volumes about her despair. Ree’s only way to survive is to find Jessup, or prove that he’s dead—a task that she has to carry out utterly alone.

Granik’s film is exceptional in its portrayal of flinty, unyielding communities. The morals at work in the story are not sentimental; they are as cold and foreboding as the wintertime Ozarks themselves. Codes of honor as strict as those of a Greek tragedy still operate among the families who live near Ree, and blood feuds run for generations. Men are violent and ruthless, while women appear even crueler—with beaten faces ravaged by their own families, they nevertheless fight and protect their husbands with tooth and nail. The patriarchal honor code is key to their existence.

Though the events of the film are, at face value, horrifying, the power of Granik’s narrative comes from the fact that she never allows it to become melodramatic. Some scenes touch on the Gothic thriller, but there are so many moments in which “Winter’s Bone” could have assumed an entirely different tone. Opportunities for Lynchian rural creepiness or soap opera schmaltz abound, and yet the film remains utterly unsentimental, depicting moral codes without being moralizing. “Winter’s Bone” is as penetrating and harrowing as the frosty, sharp light that seeps through the Ozark forests themselves.

—Staff writer Sophie O. Duvernoy can be reached at sduvern@fas.harvard.edu.