Matisse van Rossum’s review published on Letterboxd:
Wendy and Lucy is a very simple but very powerful film. It's the story of a young woman and her dog (who seems to be her only friend in the world), who get stranded in a small town in Oregon on their way to Alaska to find work. It's a story of isolation and loneliness, but I also got a very strong Steinbeck vibe off of Wendy and Lucy. I found myself relating it to The Grapes of Wrath. While on much less grand of a scale than that classic novel (and film), it's still about trying to find a place to make a living and call a home in the midst of an economic crisis. But while the Joads had each other, Wendy only has Lucy, and watching them together is touching. This makes it even more devastating when Lucy goes missing.
Wendy and Lucy is a very intimate film. It takes little things that would be relatively minor to most people day to day and makes them incredibly important. Most of these are tragic, such as Wendy's car breaking down, or getting caught trying to steal dog food. While these would normally be minor inconveniences, to Wendy they are devastating, and we feel this poignantly. But because of this, simple acts of human kindness are also much more touching and significant.
This is not a happy movie by any stretch of the word. Despite this, it doesn't try to be overly depressing. Just painfully realistic. Even the way it looks reflects this. It's grainy, undersaturated, and dull. The locales are unimpressive, mostly just asphalt. But it's a beautiful film nonetheless. It's incredibly relatable and hits close to home. It's very easy to sympathize with Wendy, who Michelle Williams does an excellent job portraying. It left me with a knot in my stomach but kept me thinking about it all the way home. Wendy and Lucy is a very significant, but I think largely underappreciated film. It makes a powerful statement without being pushy, which is not always easy to accomplish, but Kelly Reichardt definitely pulled it off, and pulled it off masterfully.