Eye For Film >> Movies >> East Of Wall (2025) Film Review
Some say she’s a witch, we are told. Nobody knows horses like she does. She can diagnose a horse in two minutes. A blonde woman with an undercut, piercings and tattoos, she lives out east of Wall, tending the ranch that belonged to her husband and raising a daughter who can ride a horse at speeds in excess of 45mph.
She is Tabatha Zimiga, a real woman, though her story is told partly through fiction – sequences of reenactment, a sort of poetry. Her daughter is Porshia Zimiga, whom we see out on the plain in the opening scene. The girl has a bruised look to her. It’s only a year since the bereavement. As her mother struggles to keep the ranch operational, she bristles with frustration, relaxing only when the wind hits her face, her body shifts in the saddle and the horse begins to run.
This area, Porshia tells us, was once at the bottom of the sea; that’s why it’s so flat, except for the ‘bad bits’, stunning looking ripples of striated rock. They’re ‘bad’ in that they cannot easily be tamed for human use, but that also gives them a kind of resilience, something she and her mother will come to identify with. They face a difficult decision when approached by a man who wants to buy their land. He offers to let them stay there and continue with their familiar life. They can raise horses; he will sell them, the part that they’ve been struggling with. But beyond that, Tabatha understands, there will be no land for her to pass on when she dies. In fact, if they should fall out, it will always be the stranger who gets to make the decisions; and what does it mean to lose control of the land in which the man one loves is buried?
Ultimately, the film questions whether the mother and daughter can lose control of the land. That is, looked at another way, they’re a part of it. Cinematographer Austin Shelton finds ways of binding them to the landscape visually throughout. The other young people who find a living with them, working with the horses, seek to tame their emotions but discover, in the process, a new kind of wildness, a toughness that belongs to the bare rock and the tall grass and the open wind. There’s a particularity about this place that is etched into the screen. The lives it addresses are rarely see in cinema these days, at least in this honest way, but director Kate Beecroft situates them at the heart of America.
Reviewed on: 13 Jan 2026
