The immaculate coronation of a queen bee.
At its heart, The Rivals of Amziah King is about the importance of older generations building meaningful relationships with wayward young people through love, compassion and understanding, along with plenty of folksy music and absurdist humor.
Angelina LookingGlass makes the best feature debut of the year. This is the type of neo-thriller that should be nominated for several Oscars, including Best Actress and Best Picture, but who knows if it’ll make a deep enough cultural impact to land itself within that groove?
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to turn this on. But I’m so happy that I did.
I pegged this movie as great the moment that big WTF HFS moment happens right up front with the hair (you’ll know what scene I mean when you see it), then knew it was a modern classic the second that old lady started running into glass doors. But when Chimmy hit that pothole driving that bus full of kids?
This thing is truly rustling through a unique geography all its own.
Whelp.
I guess Bee Keeping is an official action thriller sub-genre now, and I’m ok with that, since it keeps producing original films full of unpredictable whimsy.
And that is probably the easiest way to explain what makes The Rivals of Amziah King such a strange little beast. Andrew Patterson, following up his terrific The Vast of Night, builds an entire rural Oklahoma universe where beekeeping, bluegrass, family, crime, religion, revenge and some truly jaw-dropping behavior can somehow occupy the same movie without immediately collapsing under the weight of it all.
Though, about an hour in, I was truly starting to wonder why this was labeled as a “crime thriller.”
Then an unexpected tragedy hits at the halfway mark…
Suddenly the movie changes. Not completely. All the weirdness is still there. But the movie’s center of gravity shifts, and so does the person carrying it.
I had zero idea what I was walking into, other than Matthew McConaughey is playing a beekeeper. Just like Jason Statham before him. Only our little hunk of heaven here has a completely different way of going about his business.
Amziah King isn’t exactly Jason Statham’s The Beekeeper. There isn’t a secret government organization waiting around to turn McConaughey loose on a bunch of bad guys. Amziah is a musician, beekeeper, community fixture and general-purpose good guy who seems to know everybody in town and somehow has time to help with whatever bizarre problem wanders through his front door.
The first half of the movie lets us live in that world.
And I loved vacationing there. I’m ready to repack my bags and move there, quite honestly.
The bluegrass, the bees, the little town, the strange collection of people, the homemade feeling of the whole thing. Patterson isn’t in a hurry to shove the plot down our throat. He lets it drizzle down our throat like a long drip of raw honey strait from the bottle. He lets the world breathe, and that makes the movie’s eventual tsunami hit way harder than it otherwise should.
Apparently, they weren’t exactly faking the bees, either. The production used real bees, and NPR reported that LookingGlass was covered with roughly 10,000 of them for one scene. McConaughey also discovered during production that he was highly allergic to bee stings.
So, yeah.
I guess everybody was taking this beekeeper thing pretty seriously.
But don’t judge the poster by the glare of that grin: This isn’t McConaughey’s movie. At all. It belongs to LookingGlass, who easily captures hearts with her winning smile, easing the blow when we watch her try to shlef-off a beloved 12-year-old pet, while also doing some quite dastardly, yet necessary, deeds that wouldn’t strike so soft a landing on the opposite side of a rougher set of hands.
LookingGlass is remarkable here. Kateri could have easily become the standard mysterious young woman dropped into the middle of a quirky small-town movie, but LookingGlass gives her an internal life that makes even her quietest moments feel loaded. She can look completely lost one second and like she’s already figured out exactly what she’s going to do the next. she does this all with the kind of disarming smile that seems pleasant enough at first, but really started giving me the creeps once we realize, hey, she might just have a touch of sociopathic behavior.
For a good hour, she seems content riding in the passenger seat. Then the movie unexpectidly hands her the keys. That’s when I realized what Patterson had been doing all along. It’s one of those deliberate slow burns that eats the rope at such a steady pace, you don’t mind the meander. All that time spent hanging around Amziah and his strange little hive is never wasted. We needed to know these people to understand this place. Patterson wants us to buy into the warmth of it all before pulling all the pieces apart. He also sort of wants us to empathize with the bad guy, which is why Kurt Russell is so perfectly cast. He’s a mean bastard, but something about his socked feet on the couch puts us instantly off edge. Maybe Kateri is the real villain?
Nah, but Russell has a certain knack for pulling us on his side, when we definitely shouldn’t be there, giving the film an edge absent from other more recent thrillers. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in modern cinema as of late.
McConaughey is really good here, too. This is a role that fits his particular brand of Southern charm like a glove, and he gives Amziah an almost goofy sweetness that makes the darker turns land with more weight. But let’s face it, LookingGlass walks away with the movie. That is one heck of a way to make a feature debut.
There is also something wonderfully refreshing about a movie that refuses to tell you what genre it’s going to be for very long. The Rivals of Amziah King starts as a quirky rural hangout movie, wanders through beekeeping drama and bluegrass musical territory, starts sniffing around a crime story, and eventually turns into something much more dangerous. And somehow I’m sitting there thinking, “Sure. Bees. Why not?”
The whole thing has the feeling of somebody finding a bunch of movies in an Oklahoma barn, throwing them into a blender and somehow getting honey. There are moments where you may wonder exactly where Patterson thinks he’s going as he slowly pours out this strange, sweet, messy mix. I’d best describe it as the same sensation you get from eating breakfast at night for dinner.
When The Rivals of Amziah King is working, it is working on a frequency that most studio movies don’t even bother trying to find anymore. There is a genuine affection for these people, and it’s infectious. That’s probably why the movie’s biggest twists work as well as they do. Patterson has created a community that feels lived in before he starts yanking it through hades.
The Rivals of Amziah King is an unexpected pleasure. It’s definitely one of 2026’s best movies. If you like quirky, unpredictable, genuinely nice people surviving rural mishaps not of their own making? Then tighten those laces and take this walk. Just don’t forget your mandolin and make sure you leave Flash Thompson at home.
