Savage StateMovies like Savage State
- Key Features:
- American Civil War, Family survival, Historical drama, Refugee experience, Violence-moderate, 19th century, Montana, Wealth and privilege, Political upheaval
- Tone:
- serious, gritty, dramatic
- Target Audience:
- History buffs, Drama enthusiasts, Independent film viewers, Viewers interested in social commentary
- Emotional Arc:
- Anxiety → Fear → Desperation
Savage State

Saint Charles County, Missouri, December 1863. Edmond, a prosperous French perfume merchant, decides to flee to a safer place when the storms of the American Civil War start knocking at his door, threatening the life and fortune of his family.
Savage State
Former P.O.W. Jack Calgrove moves Heaven and Earth to be reunited with his children following the Civil War. After returning home, Jack discovers that his wife has tragically died and his children, presumed to be orphans, are heading deep into the West on a train crossing enemy lines, with the intent of being placed into new homes. Calgrove and another soldier team up with a troop of Native American sharpshooters and a freed slave as they try to stop the train.

A gang of young thieves flee Paris during the violent aftermath of a political election, only to hole up at an Inn run by neo-Nazis.

It's summer, somewhere in the Dordogne, young people disappear. The wildest rumors circulate, we are talking about a feline prowling. Laura, seeks to elucidate the mystery and meets Paul, a strange writer who attracts him as much as he scares her. As they get closer, a lover spurned by Laura disappears in turn.

After Drew Dixon, an upright young man, is sent west by his religious family to avoid being drafted into the Civil War, he drifts across the land with a loose confederation of young vagrants.

In 1863, Mississippi farmer Newt Knight serves as a medic for the Confederate Army. Opposed to slavery, Knight would rather help the wounded than fight the Union. After his nephew dies in battle, Newt returns home to Jones County to safeguard his family but is soon branded an outlaw deserter. Forced to flee, he finds refuge with a group of runaway slaves hiding out in the swamps. Forging an alliance with the slaves and other farmers, Knight leads a rebellion that would forever change history.

A young Abigale Archer is left friendless and alone in a brutal Montana winter during the 1870s—fighting for survival and to retrieve her one earthly possession, her family’s horse, from a gang of bloodthirsty bandits.

The Marquis d’Urfé finds refuge in the home of a strange family after becoming lost in a hostile forest while working as an emissary for the King of France.

Two young brothers are abandoned by their mother during summer of 1948, they run into the forest and survive there for seven years.

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

When a rare Lakota Ghost Shirt falls into the black market in a small town in South Dakota, the lives of local outsiders and outcasts violently intertwine.

After discovering her father put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared, 17-year-old Ree Dolly must confront the local criminal underworld and the harsh Ozark wilderness in order to to track down her father and save her family.

A sister and brother face the realities of familial responsibility as they begin to care for their ailing father.

A young husband and wife must fight to return home in a post-apocalyptic mid-western landscape ravaged by gangs.

In 1859, idealist John Wickliff Shawnessey, a resident of Raintree County, Indiana, is distracted from his high school sweetheart Nell Gaither by Susanna Drake, a rich New Orleans girl. This love triangle is further complicated by the American Civil War, and dark family history.

When a small town near the Arizona-Mexico border is wiped out overnight, suspicion falls on the lone survivor. But a roll of photos the survivor took that night tells a different story.

As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.

A sheriff tries to keep the peace when a desperate family man violently robs a pill mill with his brother-in-law, alerting an enforcer for the New Orleans mafia.

The oldest son of a loving and strong family of black sharecroppers comes of age in the Depression-era South after his father is imprisoned for stealing food.

While holidaying in the French Alps, a Swedish family deals with acts of cowardliness as an avalanche breaks out.

Three family members head deep into the woods for a hunting trip that doubles as a distraction from their troubles at home. When all of their gear is stolen, they turn on each other, but soon realize there are much more treacherous forces at work.

A mountain man who wishes to live the life of a hermit becomes the unwilling object of a long vendetta by Indians when he proves to be the match of their warriors in one-to-one combat on the early frontier.

In this radically reimagined American Western set towards the end of the Civil War, Southerner Augusta encounters two renegade, drunken soldiers who are on a mission of pillage and violence. After escaping an attempted assault, Augusta races back to the isolated farmhouse that she shares with her sister Louise and their female slave Mad. When the pair of soldiers track Augusta down intent on exacting revenge, the trio of women are forced to take up arms to fend off their assailants, finding ways to resourcefully defend their home––and themselves––as the escalating attacks become more unpredictable and relentless.

There is a global civil war between men and women. A teenage girl tries to escape this reality and arrives at a hidden place where a strange unicorn lives with a family: sister, brother, many children and an old, bedridden woman who stays in contact with the world through her radio.

A legendary Native American-hating Army captain nearing retirement in 1892 is given one last assignment: to escort a Cheyenne chief and his family through dangerous territory back to his Montana reservation.

In the late 1800s, a fanatical religious leader, a renegade Sheriff, and a former prostitute collide in a blood triangle on the rugged plains of the New Mexico Territory.

In 1933, a young woman and her father discover an Alabama plantation whose inhabitants live as if slavery had never been abolished. Feeling a sense of duty to those behind the heavy gates, she stays to liberate the people and see them through their first harvest. With four of her father's colleagues and a lawyer, she faces the daunting task of resurrecting the place known as Manderlay.

Oregon, 1851. Hermann Kermit Warm, a chemist and aspiring gold prospector, keeps a profitable secret that the Commodore wants to know, so he sends the Sisters brothers, two notorious assassins, to capture him on his way to California.

On an isolated English farm in 1657, Fanny lives a quiet life with her oppressive husband John and their young son. One day their life is rocked with the arrival of young couple Thomas and Rebecca who claim to have been robbed and need a place to stay. But are these strangers really who they say they are?

After avenging his family's brutal murder, Wales is pursued by a pack of soldiers. He prefers to travel alone, but ragtag outcasts are drawn to him - and Wales can't bring himself to leave them unprotected.

A family of sadistic butchers lives deep inside the backcountry. From the dead of winter to the dog days of summer, anyone who crosses their path is dead meat.

Alice, a perfect wife and mother, lives happily with her husband and child until the day she discovers he is living a double life that has ruined her financially and left her a single mother. Alice fights back and dives into a world beyond anything she has ever known.

A sawmill owner and his teenage daughter become tangled in a deadly feud when a drug dealer stashes stolen cocaine on their remote property.

Clara and Hans are left-wing terrorists who have been sought by police for almost fifteen years. Their increasingly rebellious daughter Jeanne begins to pose a threat to their security when she falls in love with a boy she meets on the beach.

Emma le Roux just wants to go home for the holidays. Gentle, beautiful, pacifist Emma. She's made the trip to her father's farm a thousand times. Piece of cake. But not today. Today she will cross paths with members of a violent drug syndicate. Everything starts falling apart, and fast. At first they were driven by hate and revenge. Suddenly, it's survival.

The local sheriff of Dead River, Maine, thought he had killed them off ten years ago -- a primitive, cave-dwelling tribe of cannibalistic savages. But somehow the clan survived. To breed. To hunt. To kill and eat. And now the peaceful residents of this isolated town are fighting for their lives...

At the beginning of the 1940s, in a France occupied by Nazi forces, lived the Jewish Joffo family. Happy and tight-knit, she sees her future darken when all members of the family are forced to wear the yellow star. Fearing the worst, the parents organized their family to flee to the free zone in the south of the country. Maurice, twelve years old, and Joseph, ten years old, will therefore leave alone in order to maximize their chances of finding their older brothers already settled in Nice. The brothers left to their own devices demonstrate an incredible amount of cleverness, courage, and ingenuity to escape the enemy invasion and to try to reunite their family once again.

In 1914, sixteen year old Roger returned home from boarding school during vacation to find his puberty hit hard in a house filled with beautiful women. These women have previous engagements with other men who are away, and during this time, Roger impregnates them all, including his aunt and sister, then devises plans to cuckold the men.

Drama about a father and son who set out to find their missing daughter/sister with the help of an American headhunter.

Two teenage boys find a fugitive hiding out on an island in the Mississippi River and help him reunite with his lover and escape an avenging family and their armed posse.

A small-town Oregon teacher and her brother, the local sheriff, discover a young student is harbouring a dangerous secret that could have frightening consequences.

The new film by French director Cédric Kahn focusses on Philippe Fournier, a man who lives with his 2 sons, having decided not to give them back to their mother after she won custody of the children. The children Okyesa and Tsali must grow up in the shadow, hunted by the police but always free and on the move.

Martial arts expert Matt Hunter was one of the most promising operatives in Army intelligence until his parents were killed by terrorists, and he retired to the family's farm in Louisiana to take care of his 12-year-old sister Sara and their grandfather Jimmy. Larry Richards, a black man running for the Senate, is one of Matt's best friends. Larry has become the target of The Pentangle, a racist organization led by a man named Glastenbury, and Glastenbury doesn't want Larry to be elected. In an attempt on Larry's life during a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, The Pentangle kills one of Larry's sons. Matt lets Larry, his wife Daisy, and his other son move to the remotely located farm so they can hide from Glastenbury and the Pentangle, but the Pentangle strikes again, setting the farmhouse on fire. Matt and Sara escape as the only survivors. Then the Pentangle kidnaps Sara, sending Matt on a mission to rescue Sara from Glastenbury and the Pentangle

14-year-old Joe is the only child of Jeanette and Jerry — a housewife and a golf pro — in a small town in 1960s Montana. Nearby, an uncontrolled forest fire rages close to the Canadian border, and when Jerry loses his job (and his sense of purpose) he decides to join the cause of fighting the fire, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves.

In the midst of a volatile regime change in a Francophone African state, Maria Vial is fighting to sustain her family’s coffee plantation. With rebels and the army struggling for control, French peacekeeping forces move out, warning the remaining white residents that they’re on their own. But Maria refuses to be driven off the land, even as tragedy looms.

Jen's romantic getaway with her wealthy married boyfriend is disrupted when his friends arrive for an impromptu hunting trip. Tension mounts at the house until the situation culminates in an unexpected way.

When the Davison family comes under attack during their wedding anniversary getaway, the gang of mysterious killers soon learns that one of their victims harbors a secret talent for fighting back.

In the 16th century in the Cévennes, a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas leads a happy and prosperous family life. When a lord treats him unjustly, this pious, upstanding man raises an army and puts the country to fire and sword in order to have his rights restored.

Miriam and Antoine have recently separated. While she’s willing to permit their 17-year-old daughter Josephine to decide living arrangements for herself, Miriam is desperate to keep her youngest, 11-year-old Julien, away from his father. But the magistrate rules in favour of joint custody, and suddenly the boy is thrown directly into the middle of an escalating parental conflict, where it seems inevitable that sides must be chosen.

The survival instincts of a road-tripping family are put to the test when they have no other choice but to stay the night at a remote homestead.

Set in Middle America, a group of teens receive an online invitation for sex, though they soon encounter Christian fundamentalists with a much more sinister agenda.

Two young horse traders guide a Mormon wagon train to the San Juan Valley and encounter rugged terrain, the cutthroat Clegg gang, hospitable Navajo, and moral challenges on the journey.

A decade after the American Civil War, Edward Young returns home from a hunting trip to find a horrific reanimation of his wife and that their son Adam has disappeared. He must battle his way through an unexplainable outbreak of the walking dead.

Nate takes his family for a camping trip to reconnect. When they pull off at a rest stop, a gang of thieves hides their stash from an armored car robbery among the family belongings. They soon find themselves on the run and the gang will stop at nothing to get their money back.

When the South loses the war, Confederate veteran O'Meara goes West, joins the Sioux, takes a wife and refuses to be an American but he must choose a side when the Sioux go to war against the U.S. Army.

An adaptation of Émile Zola’s 1877 masterpiece L’assommoir, the film is an uncompromising depiction of a lowly laundress’s struggles to deal with an alcoholic husband while running her own business.

Mousse and Louis are young, beautiful, rich and in love. But drugs have invaded their lives. One day, they overdose and Louis dies. Mousse survives, but soon learns she's pregnant. Feeling lost, Mousse runs away to a house far from Paris. Several months later, Louis' brother joins her in her refuge.

Kimberly, a teenager suffering from agoraphobia, has not left the house since her mother's unsolved murder. On the eve of Thanksgiving, she begins to suspect that the safe harbor of home and her doting father may be a dangerous mirage.

The tragic death of a beautiful young girl starts a tense and atmospheric game of cat and mouse between hunter John Moon and the hardened backwater criminals out for his blood.

A disturbed, aging Southern belle moves in with her sister for solace — but being face-to-face with her brutish brother-in-law accelerates her downward spiral.

A Swedish immigrant family struggles to adapt to their new life on the American frontier during the second half of the 19th century amidst civil war, native uprising and the lure of gold in California.

A shy and insecure delivery driver arrives on the scene of a robbery-gone-wrong and picks up two bags of cash and hides them in his truck. He is interrogated by two tough police detectives and manages to evade suspicion but he is warned that whoever owns the money will be looking for it. Only the help of a prostitute and a former biker recently released from jail might get him out of trouble.

A former Union Army officer plans to sell out to Anchor Ranch and move east with his fiancée, but the low price offered by Anchor's crippled owner and the outfit's bullying tactics make him reconsider. When one of his hands is murdered he decides to stay and fight, utilizing his war experience. Not all is well at Anchor with the owner's wife carrying on with his brother who also has a Mexican woman in town.

After ratting out his Mafia cohorts, Giovanni Manzoni and his family enter the Witness Protection Program and relocate to a sleepy town in France. Despite the best efforts of their handler to keep them in line, Giovanni (now called Fred Blake), his wife and children can't help but resort to doing things the "family" way. However, their dependence on such old habits places everyone in danger from vengeful mobsters.

Fleeing the June 1940 arrival of Hitler's army in Paris, a young war widow and her two children are rescued from dive-bombing German fighters by a cocky, reckless teenager. He finds them refuge in an abandoned house, but despite the fact that the family quickly comes to be depending much on his cunning and survival abilities, their cohabitation proves uneasy.

France, World War II. In order to somehow make ends meet, the mother of two children, Marie Latour, does underground abortions and rents a room to a familiar prostitute. She doesn't pay any attention to her husband, who returned from the war because of his injury and lives her own life. Abortions gradually begin to bring a good income, and boredom can be easily dispelled by starting a young lover.

Chaos consumes a small town when a chemical facility explodes releasing a deadly toxin. Moments after the leak, the town's residents show signs of mutation, causing the military to quarantine the area leaving any survivors helpless and trapped inside. The story follows Jim, a young man isolated within the red zone, as he eludes flesh eating zombies in an attempt to win back his freedom.

Massachusetts, 1892. An unmarried woman of 32 and a social outcast, Lizzie lives a claustrophobic life under her father's cold and domineering control. When Bridget Sullivan, a young maid, comes to work for the family, Lizzie finds a sympathetic, kindred spirit, and a secret intimacy soon blossoms into a wicked plan.

Karl and Kristina Nilsson work on a farm in a cold and desolate area of 19th century rural Sweden. Growing privations, combined with increasing social and religious persecution, motivate the Nilssons and many of their neighbors to strike out for the United States. Following a treacherous ocean crossing and an equally grueling land passage, the emigrants find themselves in seemingly idyllic Minnesota.

When Blanche meets Grégoire, she thinks she has found the one. The ties that bind them grow quickly, and a passionate affair ensues. Together, they relocate. For Blanche, far from her family, from her twin sister, Rose, a new life begins. But little by little, she finds herself caught in the grip of a deeply possessive and dangerous man.

Lesia, a teenager, is taken by a man to a villa where her fugitive father and his men are hiding. A war erupts, leading to death and a chase where father and daughter bond.

Zachary, 17 years old, gets out of jail. Rejected by his mother, he hangs out in the mean streets of Marseille. He falls in love with Shéhérazade, a young prostitute of whom he becomes the pimp without realizing it...

A former slave who arrives in Yellowstone City, Montana, a desolate former boomtown now on the decline, looking for a place to call home. On that same day, a local prospector discovers gold - and is murdered.

The adventures of an upper-class suburban family abruptly confronted with the younger brother's discovery of his homosexuality, the elder sister's suicide attempt and sadomasochist tendencies, and the intrusion of a very free-spirited maid and her husband. And it all started with the arrival in the family of an innocent looking rat.

Alain Lefevre is a boxer paid by a Marseille mobster to take a dive. When he wins the fight he attempts to flee to America with the mobster's girlfriend Katrina. This plan fails and he seeks escape by joining the foreign legion. As part of the legion he tangles with abusive lieutenant Steinkampf and bonds with legionnaires Luther, Mackintosh and Rosetti.

While Olivier, a 39 year-old foreman gives his job everything he’s got, Laura, his wife and the mother of their two children, abandons the family home, leaving Olivier alone to face his responsibilities. Lost and completely thrown, Olivier is going to have to come to terms with his new status as a single father raising his children alone. Because Laura’s not coming back.

A group of Italian tourists on a Caribbean holiday finds itself stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash.

Successful author Veronica finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality and must uncover the mind-bending mystery before it's too late.

Wealthy rancher Bick Benedict and dirt-poor cowboy Jett Rink both woo Leslie Lynnton, a beautiful young woman from Maryland who is new to Texas. She marries Benedict, but she is shocked by the racial bigotry of the White Texans against the local people of Mexican descent. Rink discovers oil on a small plot of land, and while he uses his vast, new wealth to buy all the land surrounding the Benedict ranch, the Benedict's disagreement over prejudice fuels conflict that runs across generations.

Sandra, a young woman forced to leave the south of France to flee a violent husband. Without attachment, she returned to Boulogne-sur-Mer, the city of her childhood which she left almost 15 years ago. She finds her mother there and a world she left behind. Without money, she is hired in a fish cannery where she befriends two workers. But one day, one of her colleagues tackles her insistently, she defends herself and kills him accidentally.

The Civil War has ended, but Colonel Morsman Carver is on one final mission – to kill Gideon, no matter what it takes. Launched by a gunshot and propelled by rage, the relentless pursuit takes the two men through frigid snow-capped mountains and arid deserts, far from the comforts and codes of civilisation, into the bloodiest recesses of their own souls.

In a post-apocalyptic world, the residents of an apartment above the butcher shop receive an occasional delicacy of meat, something that is in low supply. A young man new in town falls in love with the butcher's daughter, which causes conflicts in her family, who need the young man for other business-related purposes.

Five American soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II struggle to return to Allied territory after being separated from U.S. forces during the historic Malmedy Massacre.

Norman is not just an admirer of nature, he's a part of it. He survives the harshness of the climate and the wildlife by coexisting with it. With his wife Nebraska, they live almost entirely off the land, making money by selling their furs.

A group of settlers traveling through the Oregon High Desert in 1845 find themselves stranded in harsh conditions.

When an overachieving college senior makes a wrong turn, her road trip becomes a life-changing fight for survival in rural Kentucky.

A young man, convinced he's a vampire, goes to live with his elderly and hostile cousin in a small Pennsylvanian town, where he tries to suppress his bloodlust.

Based on the Depression-era bildungsroman memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film follows the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.

On August 15, 1944 the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team (PRCT) jumped over the south of France. Their mission was to support and protect the Allied Troops marching to Berlin. Landing in enemy territory, they fell under immediate attack. In their effort to complete the mission and rendez-vous with their unit, three isolated paratroopers come across a group of French resistants in desperate need. They decide to help liberate some of the captive Partisans. Doing so they will risk their lives.

In 1864, during the American Civil War, Mexican cattleman Alvarez Kelly supplies the Union with cattle until unexpected circumstances force him to change his customers.

Fifteen-year-old Suzanne seeks refuge from a disintegrating family in a series of impulsive, promiscuous affairs. Her fulsome sexuality further ratchets up the suppressed passions of her narcissistic brother, insecure mother and brooding, authoritarian father.

Pot growers Ben and Chon face off against the Mexican drug cartel who kidnapped their shared girlfriend.

After losing their family home in Algeria in the 1920s, three brothers and their mother are scattered across the globe. Messaoud joins the French army fighting in Indochina; Abdelkader becomes a leader of the Algerian independence movement in France and Saïd moves to Paris to make his fortune in the shady clubs and boxing halls of Pigalle.

Northern Spain, October 1944. Several groups of guerrilla fighters, former Republican soldiers exiled in France after the end of the Spanish Civil War, infiltrate the country in order to provoke a popular uprising against General Franco's dictatorship.

Set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 1950s, this is the story of Éliane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, set against the backdrop of the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement.

Troy and his young transgender son Joe are on the run from his conservative mother in the Montana wilderness, with a detective in hot pursuit.

In the 1860s, fiercely independent French-Canadian Vivienne Le Coudy embarks on a journey with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen, attempting to forge a life together in the dusty town of Elk Flats, Nevada. When Holger decides to go fight for the Union in the burgeoning Civil War, Vivienne must fend for herself, which isn't easy in a town controlled by a corrupt mayor.

Paris, 1884. The lives of three orphaned children wandering the streets dominated by ruthless criminals change tragically when they carry out a daring robbery.

After years of separation, Irena Gallier and her minister brother, Paul, reunite in New Orleans. When zoologists capture a wild panther, Irena is drawn to the cat – and zoo curator Oliver to her. Soon, Paul will have to reveal the family secret: that when sexually aroused, they revert into predatory jungle cats.

