Chloé Zhao rebuilds her voice

Chloé Zhao's post-Eternals return is not a mea culpa, but it is a recalibration. The new film, shot in the American Southwest with a mostly non-professional cast, feels like a conscious effort to re-inhabit the register that made Nomadland one of the more emotionally honest films of the past decade. It is not a masterpiece. It is, however, a serious piece of filmmaking, and it clarifies what her Marvel detour did and did not cost her.

The core of her craft has always been the interview. Zhao's method involves long conversations with her cast in the locations she plans to shoot, and then a script that respects the language the subjects actually use. Eternals was a bad fit for that method — a Marvel film runs on plot and quip, not on silence and observation — and the result was a film that felt confused about whether it wanted to be a superhero movie or a Zhao film. It was neither.

The new work returns to first principles. The framing is patient, the sound design foregrounds wind and distance, and the actors — many of them local to the shooting region — are given room to sit inside their scenes without being cut around. There is a scene in a diner that runs six uninterrupted minutes and is the best-directed thing she has shot since Nomadland's parking-lot goodbye.

The counterargument is a structural one. Zhao's non-fictional method depends on very small budgets and very long shoots, and it is not clear how many of these films the American independent scene can sustainably fund. A24 has been generous, but that generosity has limits, and the streamers are not obviously interested. If Zhao is to keep making these films, the industry will need to decide what a Zhao film is worth beyond festival applause.

For now, it is enough that the film exists. The Marvel detour was, in the end, a survivable mistake — expensive in reputation, corrective in retrospect. Zhao has come back to her voice and it is still intact. That is more than can be said for several of her contemporaries who took the same corporate paycheque and never quite came home.