Wendy and Lucy is seventy-six minutes long, and it broke me in half.
Kelly Reichardt makes these small, quiet films about people on the margins, and this one is about Wendy, a woman traveling to Alaska with her dog Lucy, trying to find work. Her car breaks down in Oregon. She has almost no money. She shoplifts some dog food and gets caught. And while she’s detained, Lucy goes missing.
That’s the whole plot. A woman and her dog, separated by circumstance and bad luck.
I watched this a month after I’d been evicted from my apartment. I was staying on a friend’s couch, trying to figure out my next move, feeling like my life was held together with duct tape and hope. And watching Wendy’s life unravel—slowly, inexorably, through no real fault of her own—felt like watching my own fears play out on screen.
What Reichardt understands is that poverty isn’t dramatic. It’s not one big catastrophe. It’s a series of small failures that compound. Wendy’s car breaks down, so she can’t get to Alaska. She doesn’t have money to fix it. She steals dog food because she can’t afford it. She gets arrested. She can’t afford bail. She loses her dog. She can’t afford the shelter fees. Each problem creates the next problem, and there’s no way out.
There’s a scene where Wendy is searching for Lucy, calling her name in the woods, and you can hear the desperation in her voice. Lucy isn’t just a pet. She’s Wendy’s only companion, her only source of unconditional love, her only reason to keep going. And now she’s gone.
I had to pause the film because I was crying too hard to see the screen.
The film’s ending is ambiguous. Wendy finds Lucy, but Lucy has been taken in by a family who can actually care for her. And Wendy has to make a choice: take Lucy back and continue their precarious existence, or leave her with people who can give her a stable life.
She chooses to leave. She says goodbye to Lucy, gets on a train, and rides away. And the film ends with her face, blank and exhausted, staring out the window at the landscape passing by.
It’s not a happy ending. It’s not even really a sad ending. It’s just… an ending. Wendy survives. She keeps moving. But she’s lost the one thing that made survival feel worthwhile.
After I watched Wendy and Lucy, I sat on my friend’s couch and thought about all the things I’d lost in the past year. Not just the apartment, but the sense of security, the belief that if I just worked hard enough, things would be okay. The film doesn’t offer any solutions or comfort. It just shows you the reality: sometimes you do everything right, and you still lose. Sometimes the system is rigged against you, and there’s nothing you can do.
But Wendy keeps going. She gets on that train. She moves forward. And I thought: okay. I can do that too. I can keep going. Even when it feels pointless. Even when I’ve lost everything that mattered. I can still move forward.
Wendy and Lucy is a small film, but it’s stayed with me longer than most big films. Because it’s true. Because it doesn’t lie to you about how hard life can be. Because it shows you someone surviving, not triumphantly, but stubbornly. And sometimes, that’s all you need to see.
