First impressions of The Rivals of Amziah King (2026)

The first hour of director Andrew Patterson’s second feature, The Rivals of Amziah King (now available on VOD) is some of the most surprising, joyous, fully alive filmmaking I've seen in a while. The engine purrs so smoothly, and the surprises are delivered so successfully, that I don’t have any reason or occasion to worry about a breakdown.

Live and learn, I guess.

Just as I fell under the spell of Patterson’s mid-1950s New Mexico extra-terrestrial nights in his suspenseful and funny sci-fi debut The Vast of Night (you can revisit my review here), I am quickly enveloped in the rough-edged warmth of Amziah King’s imaginary Oklahoma. Here, the drive-in burger joints are greasy, and the country folk who pull up to order food are likely to recognize each other not with suspicious scowls but with joyous smiles, and then they’ll jump out of their trucks wielding not rifles or baseball bats but musical instruments, turning the parking lot into an impromptu jam session.

And the big, bright, beating heart of this community is Amziah King, played by a perfectly cast Matthew McConaughey. King is a passionate, virtuosic beekeeper whose kindness, generosity, and love for his community run as thick and sweet as his rare crop of white clover honey.

Clearly, I’m in the minority when it comes to audience opinions of McConaughey. He, like his forerunner Tom Cruise, have both built their careers on a brash, salesman-like charisma that I find both unconvincing and untrustworthy in 9 out of 10 roles. I prefer both actors when they’re playing eccentric supporting characters, characters who cannot be trusted, characters with dangerous impulses behind their movie-star smiles.

But in The Rivals of Amziah King, McConaughey seems perfectly cast as a guy with lead-singer charisma, a guy who just might start an Avett-Brothers-adjacent band with his co-workers and neighbors. During the opening scene, I found myself wanting to round up my old college band and hit the late-night burger circuit to play unadvertised shows in parking lots.

He’s got the kind of Ideal Coach energy that can make him the social engine of a scattered community. The crisis that draws us into the movie’s world involves Amziah’s expertise being called upon to help track professional honey thieves, and the joy he finds in his work is inspiring. He’s got that Ideal Dad warmth that can draw young people into his orbit and become their inspirational foster father.

And it doesn’t take long for us to learn that he has been exactly that, a life-changing foster father for Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), who wanders back into Amziah’s community as if he might be her only hope to find her feet in adulthood. Seeking purpose, she takes a job waiting tables nearby, and when he finds her there, she opens up like an exuberant sunflower in the light of her former guardian’s effervescent smile. It doesn’t take long before she’s back in his house and back under the influence of his kitchen jam sessions and his affirmation of her value.

I’ll keep my comments about the rest of the film brief, as its unpredictability is mostly a strength, but it is also arguably instrumental in why the second half becomes disorienting and ultimately more than a little frustrating. The first hour is as much fun as I’ve had at the movies so far this year. During the stage-setting chapters, I believe in the place, the characters, the practice of beekeeping (and the dramatic art of rogue swarm gathering) in ways that make me care very much about where this story was going.

The movie sounds as good or better than it looks. Within minutes, I found myself thinking, The music in this is so perfectly integrated into the film, it would be easy to convince somebody that T Bone Burnett is involved. (Roll the credits, and... boom! There he is.) At one point, I thought, You know who would fit right into this musical world? Shovels and Rope! And suddenly, there they are! 

When an expert banjo-player played by Tony Revolori (The Grand Budapest Hotel) gets a little too curious about the honey collection process, the audience learns, in a rather shocking fashion, that Patterson is prone to taking big swings in his storytelling. (I haven’t been so startled by blood-splatter at a movie in a very long time.) This bizarre and yet entirely convincing turn makes me lean forward, ready to go wherever Patterson wants to take me.

In fact, everything related to beekeeping in the film persuades me to stick with the movie to the end. McConaughey and LookingGlass engage with the ancient art of honey as if they’ve been doing this their whole lives. Dramatizations of this discipline is so convincingly and expertly handled, and just such a wild joy to watch, that I will cuss if I find out any of it is CGI.

But that second hour?

I’d be hard-pressed to think of a movie that squanders its promise so severely. The aforementioned Turn represents a huge risk on the part of the storytellers, and by that point I’m feeling such goodwill toward the film that I want them to make it work. And they do... for a while.

Then, the movie veers away from the wild frontiers of Act One onto a more familiar road into genre fiction territory. Patterson introduces Dob McCoy (Kurt Russell, making menace and malevolence look easy), a rival businessman who runs a major beekeeping operation and who represents a dehumanizing corporate influence that crushes small businesses and destroys lives and legacies without flinching. Very soon, the characters we’ve come to care about are strategizing ways to get back what the Enemy has taken from them.

The focus shifts from the extraordinary character of Amziah to the choices made by Kateri. No offense to LookingGlass, but the character she’s given to play just doesn’t have the gravitas or the wisdom to make us want to follow her into her ill-advised battle. And when the story narrows even further, asking us to accept and even root for a deadly revenge plot to play out, well ... my suspension of disbelief is spoiled, and my conscience complicates my capacity to enjoy the story’s conclusion.

I have to wonder, at this point, how to reconcile all of the Gospel I hear in the song lyrics of the film’s first hour — lines celebrating “the teachings of the one crucified” — with the alarming decisions certain characters justifying deadly violence in their resistance.

I suspect that a lot of moviegoers are very much in the mood for a “Worker Bees Versus that White Male Corporate Devil” crowd-pleaser. And Russell is just the guy to earn our vitriol with his famous shit-eating grin. (His character here is to this community what his character in Tarantino’s Death Proof was to that, um, community.) But I come away wishing that I could get behind this whole film with my whole heart, instead of making disclaimers in my disappointment.

I hope that Patterson will have many more chances to invest in low-budget projects. Coping within strict constraints, he’s capable of working wonders. I suspect he has a masterpiece or two in him before he's done. I just hope he collaborates with a screenwriter who has a stronger moral compass.