Ree Dolly is teaching her little brother to skin a squirrel. Pulling out the guts and innards, he looks up at his sister and asks, ‘Do we eat these?’ She pauses. ‘Not yet.’ It is a rare moment of dark humour in the otherwise heart-breaking Winter’s Bone.

Set deep in the backcountry of rural Missouri, this exquisite film is a devastating portrait of a forgotten America plagued by poverty and running on a black market of crystal meth.

Ree’s father Jessop is a meth ‘cook’, recently arrested and now missing. Jessop has put up the family’s house and surrounding wood-land as collateral for his bail and Ree must find him before it is seized and her mentally-ill mother and two young siblings are thrown out to ‘live like dogs in the field’. She embarks on a journey that takes her deeper into the harsh landscape of the Ozark mountains and its cattle markets, hill-billy bars, burnt-out meth labs and bare frozen forests. Her determination and fortitude against mafia-like silence and startling violence eventually lead her to the darkest depths of her community in the film’s genuinely shocking climax.

Ree Dolly is played with extraordinary skill by twenty-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, who has even been tipped for an Oscar for her performance. Ree’s raw strength and resolute spirit makes her perhaps one of the most arresting female characters in recent American film.

Winter’s Bone has already received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. I can only add my voice to the chorus of praise. This is an unforgettably haunting film and, despite all its bleakness, contains moments of incredible beauty. The final shots of Ree with her younger brother and sister echo Dorothea Lange’s famous portrait of a migrant woman and her children in the Dust Bowl.

Winter’s Bone is finally a story of survival and dignity in the face of poverty and struggle. Like Lange’s photographs, it belongs to a poignant tradition of alternative histories of the United States and is a testament to the indomitable strength of the  human spirit.