When you’ve grown up in a small, rural town, you’re fortunate if you have the option to leave and make a life in the vast unknown. You’re even more fortunate if you can exploit your past life to fund and further your current one. But you’ll find that your fortune quickly runs dry when you return to your roots and find that the subjects of your exploitation are disgusted by your fortune, the very fortune you built on the backs of their suffering. Kate Cobb’s Okie is a psychological deep dive into this very scenario.

The film follows Louie Mulgrin, unreliable in both his narration and his loyalty to his loved ones, as he returns to his disadvantaged hometown following the death of his father. As a series of events outside his control stretches his day trip to an almost weeklong bender, Louie is forced to reunite with old friends, who are now scarred and betrayed by Louie’s portrayal of them. And as he falls deeper and deeper into the nooks of familiarity, he finds that maybe he slipped into something unknown. Reality quickly becomes confusing and, frankly, terrifying. But we learn very quickly that objective reality and Louie’s reality are two entirely different things.

The tone of the film is set from the very beginning. Louie is avoiding his fiancée’s phone calls as he drives through his hometown. And as he plays the voicemail she left, it’s clear he isn’t listening, as old memories swallow him. Even from the opening scene, viewers can tell that Louie’s current life doesn’t satisfy him, yet he’s hesitant to revert to his old one. As the movie progresses, we see that Louie’s clearly lost. His desire to reignite old patterns (the patterns he prides himself of moving on from) are thinly veiled by pomposity, but his propensity towards self-sabotage removes that veil and sends him down the altar to remarry his former ways. He uses hesitancy to separate himself from his past life and mark himself as superior. But the only thing he successfully achieves is alienation–as he doubles down on his decisions to leave town and degrade his birthplace in his novels, he loses the trust of the people that live there, people he used to love. As he spends more time with them, his love for them returns and begins to flourish, but so does his paranoia. By the end of the movie, his mental instability takes over. From Louie’s perspective, we’re not sure how much is true, but we do know that by the end of the movie, he has completely severed ties with nearly everyone. He no longer has a home in his old town, and he has nothing to come back to in the town he lives in now. Louie answers the question of how a place can no longer belong to you: it’s when you risk everything to prove that you no longer belong to it.

Scott Michael Foster gives an amazing performance as a character we can’t trust. And the movie furthers his unreliability by offering a nebulous explanation as to what really happened during his visit. But if there’s anything we’re sure of, it’s this: Louie sacrificed his bond with the co-historians of his childhood in an unequivocal effort to prove to himself and his peers that he’s above the small town that raised him, and the town has exiled him for it. As both creators of the movie and as actors in it, Kate Cobb (as Louie’s ex-girlfriend Lainey) and Kevin Bigley (as Louie’s old friend Travis) effortlessly establish a tense environment, where we’re never quite sure just how safe and accepted Louie truly is.

Okie is a beautifully shot film, perfectly utilizing a small area in northern Illinois to expertly encapsulate the feel of rural America. The film skillfully navigates the balance between exposition and visual elements to relay its message. The dialogue isn’t too lenient on viewers, thrusting us into the story like we grew up with the characters. It furthers the movie’s atmosphere, forcing us to dive headfirst into the plot. Produced and filmed in only fifteen days, Okie’s cinematic decisions feel effortless, yet mesh flawlessly to propel and authenticate the plot. This, a captivating idea, and a stunning performance by each cast member has yielded a film so refreshingly absorbing, we’re glued to our seats and surprised (even a little upset) at how quickly an hour and twenty-three minutes can pass.