By Jason Osiason

Union County is a beautiful, thoughtful, quietly devastating movie. It never slips into misery porn. It looks straight at an unforgiving epidemic and chooses to humanize it instead. The film follows Cody Parsons as he tries to survive recovery in rural Ohio through Adult Recovery Court, check ins, meetings, the daily grind of staying upright when everything in your body is begging you to fold. The story is patient and observational. It isn’t chasing melodrama, it’s showing the reality of structure, accountability, and the exhausting humility of having to rebuild a life one tiny decision at a time. The thing that gives the film its soul is the way it uses unscripted testimony from people impacted by addiction, victims, families, participants. Those moments land like truth, not plot. You feel the air shift. You feel how much grief and responsibility is sitting in the room.

Tonally it reminded me of Nomadland and Sound of Metal, that same quiet, humane attention to people learning how to live inside a new reality they never asked for. The film moves with tenderness but never softens what addiction does to a person and to everyone orbiting them. There are courtroom sequences that hit like a gut punch because they are not written to be cinematic, they are written like life. People trying to speak clearly through shame. People trying to stay sober in public. People trying to forgive and not even knowing what that word means yet. And there is a counselor here, Annette Deao, who is flat out scene stealing. She has that rare presence where a single look can communicate empathy and exhaustion at the same time. One scene short from stealing the picture.

Will Poulter is remarkable. He carries the weight of addiction in a way that feels complex and nuanced, not just sad or angry or broken. He plays Cody with this constant internal negotiation happening behind his eyes, as if every moment is a decision point and he’s terrified of choosing wrong. It’s the kind of performance that makes you stop thinking about “acting” and just watch a human being try to survive. Poulter feels like he’s heading toward Jesse Plemons territory, that space where the work becomes so grounded and specific that it starts to feel inevitable. By the end I felt wrecked in the best way, not because the film is trying to punish you, but because it refuses to look away while still insisting these people deserve to be seen fully. One of the best of the festival. [ B+]