Mudbound: Dee Rees

I'm not too proud to admit that I skipped a bit of Dee Rees' Mudbound. It was the scene where one of the main black characters is seized, "tried," and mutilated by the Klu Klux Klan for having slept with a white woman while overseas fighting Nazis in Europe. I just couldn't do it. Mudbound is a film of such power and poetry that it hit me as hard, if not harder, than all the scenes of torture and injustice in Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013). Here's what I want to know. How did Rees shoot such an impressive looking film with only $10 million and just a few weeks? It looks like a finely polished Hollywood super-production. And oh, how some of the scenes echo with fire. The opening scene where two white sharecroppers almost drown while burying their Klan father in a slave's grave during a thunderstorm is the kind of thing that would have made William Faulkner green with envy.

8/10