Winter’s Bone

Comparative · 2028 Leaving Cert

Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010) is a new prescribed comparative film for the 2028 Leaving Cert. It is a tense, stripped-back survival story set in the Missouri Ozarks, and it gives you fresh, uncrowded material for Paper 2.

The film follows Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old girl holding her family together in a poor, frozen corner of rural Missouri. Her father, Jessup, has vanished. He has been cooking crank, and before he disappeared he put the family house and land up as his bond bail. If he fails to appear in court, Ree, her mother and her two younger siblings lose the only home they have. So Ree sets out to find him, dead or alive, walking from kin to kin through a closed community that does not want her asking questions.

The people she meets are her own blood. Her uncle, Teardrop, is volatile and frightening, a man wrecked by the same drug trade that swallowed her father. The community is ruled by a code of silence, and at its centre sits Thump Milton, a man nobody crosses. Ree minds her younger brother and sister with a hard tenderness, teaching them to hunt and cook because she knows nobody else will. The film watches her refuse to give up, even when refusing puts her in real danger.

For the Comparative, Winter’s Bone suits more than one mode. It works strongly for Cultural Context, because the world it shows is rigid, specific and governed by rules of poverty, kinship and silence. It also offers material for Theme or Issue (survival, family duty, the cost of poverty) and for Literary Genre (how a director builds tension and tells a story through image rather than dialogue). Because it is so new on the course, you are unlikely to be writing the same points as everyone else in the room.

Study Winter’s Bone

The clearest, most distinctive way into this film is Cultural Context. Start there, then build out to whichever mode your year is studying.