This was directed by Debra Granik who we know from Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout vehicle Winter’s Bone. This work is recognizably similar in its reverence for the wilderness and sympathy for neglected communities in the US. Unfortunately while the lead actress Thomasin McKenzie turns in a very strong performance, this film is ultimately too soft edged to be anywhere near as good as the earlier film.

Tom is a young girl who lives in a public park with her father Will away from society and everyone else. They forage for food, live in tents and while they do go to town for supplies once in a while, they are generally self sufficient. All this is quite illegal and they are eventually noticed and caught by the authorities. After verifying that Tom isn’t being abused and determining that Will is a war veteran who is suffering from PTSD, the social workers place the two in a farm whose owner is willing to give them a place to stay and a job for Will. Tom adjusts well to living in a proper house and even starts making friends but Will feels insecure, dismissing all of the accoutrements of modern life as things that don’t really belong to them anyway. One day he orders Tom to pack up what she needs and they run away again. This time he leads them to a more remote park at a higher latitude where they have to contend with the danger of freezing. The increased risk and discomfort lead Tom to start questioning her father’s decisions.

With its beautiful shots of nature, its depiction of a rustic, idealistic lifestyle and McKenzie’s excellent performance, this is a hard film to dislike which explains its almost universal appeal to critics. Naturally we are led to fear that ignorant and unsympathetic authority figures would try to tear the father and daughter pair apart so Tom’s own growing realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with her father and that she cannot always rely on his judgement makes for a strong character arc. The scenes of Tom learning how to socialize with others and how to appreciate the comforts of normal life are all very well done and there is not even the slightest hint of reproach or preachiness here. Everyone is nice and understanding so it seems like that there’s nothing objectionable about the film at all.

Yet in playing it so safe, the director strains the film’s credibility and softens much of its emotional impact. The film doesn’t go into the details of Will’s war-time experiences which is fair enough but it explores so little of his headspace that it’s hard to build up much of a rapport with him. We are meant to understand that he is so damaged that he cannot function in any kind of community, even one as kind and well meaning as the one shown here, yet is somehow smart and responsible enough to educate Tom better than what she would have learned in a normal school. He recklessly leads Tom into a forest he knows nothing about and it just so happens to host a community of veterans who are in a somewhat similar situation as himself. The amount of assistance they get from the government and sympathetic random people is frankly unbelievable. When Tom makes her decision, we are meant to see it as a hard choice but her path is so clear and frankly easy that it’s not much of a choice at all. They never fear being arrested for petty theft and breaking and entering, they don’t fear that their homelessness will put them at greater risk of being victims of crime themselves. Will is prescribed various medicines to help with his psychological ailments but luckily isn’t addicted to opioids or anything bad like that.

Winter’s Bone was a hard-hitting film because Jennifer Lawrence’s character didn’t face just one problem. She had to balance a whole host of problems against her own responsibilities in the face of a hostile community. By contrast, Leave No Trace is excessively kind to its characters and so sentimental that it has a shot of the community sitting around the trailer park and listening to gentle music, a literal Kumbaya scene. It’s pleasant to watch but so far removed from a realistic depiction of the difficulties that war veterans face that it is in no way a serious film.