Matthew McConaughey walks into The Rivals of Amziah King like the movie has been waiting six years for him.
Amziah King is a beekeeper, musician, businessman, local problem solver and the kind of man who seems to know everyone within driving distance. McConaughey plays him with all the easy charm audiences associate with him, then lets something more complicated sit underneath it. Amziah is generous because generosity has become part of the way he understands himself. He gathers people. He feeds them. He plays music with them. He solves their problems. He has made being needed into a way of life.
Andrew Patterson understands immediately that this is more interesting than simply giving McConaughey another eccentric Southern character.
The director’s first feature, The Vast of Night, took place over one long evening and moved with the nervous momentum of a rumor spreading through a small town. The Rivals of Amziah King is much larger and much messier. It stretches across rural Oklahoma, bluegrass performances, honey operations, police favors, family history and eventually a crime story that seems to arrive from another movie.
For the first hour, the sprawl is exhilarating.
Patterson introduces Amziah through activity rather than explanation. He moves from music to business to community obligations with the camera constantly trying to keep up. People appear, disappear and reappear as if the movie expects us to understand that in a small community, everyone’s story is connected to someone else’s.
Then Kateri comes back.
Played by newcomer Angelina LookingGlass, Kateri is Amziah’s former foster daughter, now older and uncertain about what exactly she wants from the relationship. Amziah sees the reunion as an opportunity to restore something that time interrupted. Kateri is more careful.
LookingGlass is the reason the movie survives its biggest tonal swings.
McConaughey can dominate a frame simply by entering it, but LookingGlass never disappears beside him. Her performance is quieter, more observant and less interested in charming the audience. Kateri is constantly evaluating the world Amziah wants to hand her, deciding which parts feel like home and which parts come with obligations she never agreed to.
Their scenes around the honey business are some of the film’s best because Patterson treats work as culture. Beekeeping is not a cute character detail. It has technique, risk, economics and etiquette. The movie understands that a community can be built around something as specific as a hive because livelihoods create their own ecosystems.
The music works the same way.
Bluegrass is not pasted onto the film to make Oklahoma feel authentic. It is one of the ways these people communicate. Patterson lets songs run, lets people gather around them and allows the camera to become part of the performance. T Bone Burnett’s musical influence can be felt throughout the picture, but the important thing is how naturally the music belongs to the people onscreen.
This is where the movie feels most singular.
The trouble begins when Patterson decides singular is not enough.
The Rivals of Amziah King keeps changing genres. A community portrait becomes a honey-industry mystery, then a crime picture, then something closer to a revenge Western. The shifts are intentional, and there is pleasure in never being quite sure what kind of scene is coming next. But intention does not automatically create cohesion.
At 130 minutes, the movie eventually starts to feel like it is carrying every idea Patterson had while writing it.
The central structural pivot is the biggest gamble. Without giving away the event that causes it, Patterson eventually shifts the movie’s center of gravity away from Amziah and toward Kateri. It is a bold decision because McConaughey has spent the first half making the film feel inseparable from his presence.
LookingGlass is good enough to carry the weight. The screenplay is less certain about how to hand it to her.
Some of the later material is gripping on its own terms, but the film loses the effortless feeling of those early community scenes. Editing that initially feels playful becomes aggressive. Music that once created texture occasionally starts underlining emotion the performances had already communicated. The plot grows more mechanical just as the characters should feel most complicated.
That does not erase the ambition.
Patterson is trying to make a piece of contemporary American folklore, one in which kindness, violence, commerce, family and community can occupy the same small patch of land. The contradictions are the point. Nobody in this world is entirely good or bad, and the film is more interested in the informal systems people build around themselves than in clean moral categories.
Kurt Russell understands the assignment immediately.
Russell’s presence carries decades of American movie mythology with it, which Patterson uses without making the appearance feel like stunt casting. Cole Sprouse, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori and Jake Horowitz help fill out a world that often feels as if it existed before the camera arrived.
That sense of life beyond the frame is the movie’s greatest achievement.
The Rivals of Amziah King is too long, too eager and occasionally too impressed by its own formal tricks. It is also the kind of second feature that makes you want to see the third one immediately. Patterson has more ideas than control right now, but there is something exciting about a filmmaker who would rather risk an overstuffed movie than make an anonymous one.
McConaughey gets the comeback role. LookingGlass gets the breakout.
Patterson gets something harder to manufacture: a movie that actually feels like somebody made it.
