Leave No Trace was a massively successful movie when it came out in 2018, with a beating heart as big as its Rotten Tomatoes score. Now the universally-acclaimed film has sauntered over to Netflix where it is currently receiving fresh attention.
The movie follows a girl named Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) and her veteran father, Will (Ben Foster) as they live and survive in a forest on the edge of Portland, Oregon, off the grid from the rest of society. After a minor misstep leads to their discovery, the pair are relocated to a new home, but “home” is far more complicated and complex than simply a roof with four walls.
The film was brought to life by Sundance Award-winning director, Debra Granik, whose previous works include Winter’s Bone and Down to the Bone, and was co-written alongside Academy Award-nominated writer, Anne Rosellini. The movie stars Ben Foster (The Messenger and Hell or High Water), and scene-stealing newcomer, Thomasin McKenzie, who previously appeared in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies as the young girl of Lake-town, Astrid.
Leave No Trace received immense praise from critics who applauded the movie’s well-balanced approach in tackling difficult concepts such as PTSD, conformity, and belonging. Like its characters, underneath its hard exterior is a soft beating heart that ended up earning the film a solid 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes – a rating that holds true even today.
Is Leave No Trace based on a true story?
Leave No Trace is indeed based on a true story. The movie was adapted from Peter Rock’s bestselling novel My Abandonment. Rock’s inspiration behind the novel came from a newspaper article he read about a young girl and her father living undetected for years in Forest Park on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. The father was a veteran who would occasionally wander into town with his daughter to collect his disability check as well as provisions from Safeway.
Eventually, the pair were discovered and relocated to a new home. The daughter was tested by authorities and asked numerous questions to figure out where she stood intillectually. As it turned out, she was ahead of where she should have been academically due to the numerous books her father had provided as well as his homeschool teachings.
After being relocated, the father and daughter struggled to feel at home and eventually disappeared and were never heard from again. As a fiction writer, Rock used the basis of the true story to build a novel, leaning on his creativity to fill in the gaps and write about what might have happened to the father-daughter duo.
The movie is one of those rare gems that hit all the right marks in all the right ways, and was well-received by critics and audiences alike. It is currently available to stream on Netflix, where it’s now receiving a whole new wave of praise.