Review: 'The Keeping Room' Starring Brit Marling Is A Promising Civil War Thriller

This review is a reprint of the one that ran during the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

We have seen many Civil War movies depicting the horror of battle, the swaths of men left dead on either side, and the idealogical rift that nearly split the country in two. But Julia Hart's 2012 Black List script takes an approach that's refreshing, setting the film during the fading days of the war, on the home front in South Carolina, where silence is a comfort and terror arrives with the sound of approaching horses. There are no grand battleground speeches or widescreen vistas of hundreds of men rushing towards their death. Instead, "The Keeping Room" attempts a blend of sexual curiosity, home invasion horror and elegiac drama, that doesn't quite work, but whose ambitions are nonetheless compelling.

On their own at the family farm, Augusta (Brit Marling), her sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and slave Mad (Muna Otaru) have forged a survivalist domesticity to last...