I've read the other reviews of The Hands That Bind, and I wonder if those reviewers saw the same movie I did. All of them talk about the characters ("nuanced"), the pacing ("slow burn"), and the cinematography ("stunning") in pretty much the same way, which is true enough, but none mentions the paranormal subplot, which I found most intriguing albeit frustratingly, probably deliberately, underdeveloped and unresolved. The film's gothic elements -- strange lights in the sky, mutilated cattle, weird noises, a mysterious black sedan, and brief episodes of violent illness -- are sprinkled here and there throughout, but if they're noticed at all by the characters, which sometimes they are not, they're met with little more than a puzzled shrug and given nary a second thought. These spooky occurrences have no obvious raison d'etre, no effect or motivating influence on the characters' actions, and no connection to the film's main story, which would be entirely unchanged as far as I could tell if they were eliminated altogether. It's as if some scenes from a sci-fi movie (e.g., The X-Files) somehow got spliced into this one due to a mix-up during final editing. Yet the effect on the viewer (at least on me) is to keep the question of what-the-heck-is-going-on-here? Front and center throughout the entire movie. Alas, that question is never answered or even hinted at. In the end, it's just a movie about a proud, soft-spoken man trying to make a living down on the farm and do right by his family in tough economic times.
