The Hollow Grove is not a film about grand battlefields or famous generals. It is a visceral, intimate portrait of the American Civil War as a raw nerve—a war fought not with flags flying, but with frozen breath and shaking hands.
R (for disturbing violence, some gruesome images, language, and thematic material involving slavery) Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes Festival Potential: Venice, Telluride, Sundance (Premiere Section) civil war film
The story follows (Jeremy Allen White), a young Union medic shattered by the massacre at Fredericksburg. Separated from his regiment and suffering from a festering leg wound, he stumbles into the dense, skeletal woods of rural Tennessee. There, he discovers Nellie Freeman (Thuso Mbedu), a literate, iron-willed woman who has fled a plantation after the master’s death. She carries only a stolen cavalry pistol and a worn copy of The Narrative of Frederick Douglass . The Hollow Grove is not a film about
The film’s centerpiece is a ten-minute, single-shot sequence inside a flooded ice cave, where Thomas must amputate his own frostbitten fingers with Nellie’s help—an act of trust that binds them beyond ideology. By the time they reach the Union lines, the question is no longer “who wins the war,” but “what kind of peace can two broken people build from the ashes?” Separated from his regiment and suffering from a