November is such a depressing month. The post-Halloween crash paired with the dampening daylight savings darkness encourages an early onset cabin fever that can make five o’clock feel like bed time. This year feels even darker with the implications of the election buzzing anxiously inside many of us as we compulsively seek out peripheral distractions for any small dose of joy. Time to rewatch BRIDESMAIDS again.

Not to mention, we’re nearing that famously polarizing holiday where complicated feelings of a nation’s shame are distracted by doggie pageants, and culturally oblivious rants from relatives are drowned out by Barefoot wine and the thought that maybe we have simply failed humanity entirely. What I’m saying is the Thanksgiving experience can be tough – Hell, they make movies about it.

Initially I wanted to curate a watchlist of zany holiday horror movies that featured dinner table debauchery and vengeful killer turkeys, but considering the thick, hovering political dread, this season I’m recommending the forgotten Indigenous revenge thriller CLEARCUT (1991). This Canadian treasure mirrors familiar themes of colonization, environmental destruction and the profound rage of Indigenous communities erased by violence.

Viewers are taken on a gritty journey into the thick, forested landscape of Ontario where two white men are held captive and tortured by a psychotic Indigenous activist (Graham Greene) as a form of payback. Pulling no punches, the film asks you to measure the brutality inflicted on two white men against the centuries long oppression of an entire people.

Peter descends in a seaplane over Canadian forest where a logging company spars with the First Nations people whose land right’s he recently failed to defend in court. He’s quickly introduced to a militant activist called Arthur who takes seriously the lawyer’s frustrated threats against the company’s plant manager, soon finding himself unwillingly dragged into the wilderness alongside the taped-up executive. As they venture deeper into the backcountry, Arthur’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic, casually utilizing his righteous anger to inflict what he perceives as justified violence. But when a warning from an Indigenous elder brings forth questions about Arthur’s true nature, Peter wonders if he is merely an evil spirit.

A folk horror takedown of white liberal impotence, CLEARCUT makes for a perfectly juicy main course this Thanksgiving.

Stream on Prime/Shudder/Tubi.