R (for disturbing violence, some gruesome images, language, and thematic material involving slavery) Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes Festival Potential: Venice, Telluride, Sundance (Premiere Section)
The film’s centerpiece is a ten-minute, single-shot sequence inside a flooded ice cave, where Thomas must amputate his own frostbitten fingers with Nellie’s help—an act of trust that binds them beyond ideology. By the time they reach the Union lines, the question is no longer “who wins the war,” but “what kind of peace can two broken people build from the ashes?”
The Hollow Grove is not an easy watch. It is a quiet, brutal, and ultimately hopeful meditation on what it means to remain human when humanity has declared war on itself. For audiences weary of sanitized history or bombastic battle scenes, this film offers something rarer: the truth that freedom is a small, cold, hard-won thing, carried in a pocket next to a tattered book of words that once seemed impossible. civil war film
Their meeting is not a rescue. It is a wary negotiation. Thomas offers medical knowledge; Nellie offers the backwoods routes and survival instincts he lacks. Together, they head for a rumored Union outpost forty miles north. But the no-man’s-land between the armies has its own law. Hunted by a ruthless Confederate (Ben Foster, speaking barely above a whisper) who treats human beings as chattel, and haunted by a Union patrol that sees Nellie as “contraband” rather than a person, Thomas and Nellie must decide if the color of a uniform matters more than the color of skin.
The Hollow Grove is not a film about grand battlefields or famous generals. It is a visceral, intimate portrait of the American Civil War as a raw nerve—a war fought not with flags flying, but with frozen breath and shaking hands. R (for disturbing violence, some gruesome images, language,
The war made them enemies. The winter made them allies. The truth made them free.
The Hollow Grove Logline: In the winter of 1863, a wounded Union soldier and a runaway enslaved woman must form an unholy alliance to survive a frozen no-man’s-land haunted by deserters, bounty hunters, and the ghosts of their own pasts. For audiences weary of sanitized history or bombastic
The story follows (Jeremy Allen White), a young Union medic shattered by the massacre at Fredericksburg. Separated from his regiment and suffering from a festering leg wound, he stumbles into the dense, skeletal woods of rural Tennessee. There, he discovers Nellie Freeman (Thuso Mbedu), a literate, iron-willed woman who has fled a plantation after the master’s death. She carries only a stolen cavalry pistol and a worn copy of The Narrative of Frederick Douglass .
