Sarah's Oil

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

I’ve always liked movies that understand dirt as more than background. In Cyrus Nowrasteh’s *Sarah's Oil*, the Oklahoma ground is both adversary and deliverance. The story begins in the early 1900s, with the Dawes Allotment Act leaving the Rector family—descendants of the Creek Freedmen—with 160 acres of land everyone around them considers barren and useless. When young Sarah Rector insists oil lies beneath it, the adults greet her with the tired smiles reserved for children speaking in impossibilities. But Sarah is not trading in fantasy. She is insisting on belief. Nowrasteh, whose filmography includes far harsher material like *The Stoning of Soraya M.*, is trying something difficult here: turning a deeply fraught chapter of American history into a family-friendly historical drama.



That tonal choice is the film’s biggest complication. There is a gentleness around the edges of *Sarah's Oil* that can feel evasive. Johnny Derango’s cinematography is warm and attractive, but sometimes it is almost too polished, as if the movie is protecting the audience from the real peril of being a wealthy Black family in Jim Crow America. When the script brushes up against the machinery of exploitation—especially the white guardians circling Sarah’s money—it often softens the blow in favor of uplift. The TV Cave reviewer who wrote that the movie "occasionally runs on empty" in the climax was being fair. Still, the film comes alive whenever it stops explaining itself and simply watches Sarah think.



Naya Desir-Johnson, making her feature debut, is the reason the whole thing holds. She has a remarkable stillness. While the grown-ups whirl around her—Garret Dillahunt especially, clearly enjoying his villainy—Desir-Johnson plants herself and refuses to be pushed off center. Midway through the film there is a beautiful quiet scene where Sarah sits at a wooden table checking oil contracts herself. She says almost nothing. We just watch her eyes move over the numbers and see her jaw tighten when she spots the inconsistency in the ledger. That little hardening of the chin tells you more than a speech could. Sonequa Martin-Green and Kenric Green, playing her parents on screen as they are in life, give the family a lovely lived-in warmth, but the child at the center still controls the temperature of every scene.



Zachary Levi, meanwhile, does something more interesting than I expected with Bert Smith, the Texas wildcatter who becomes Sarah’s business partner. The script gives him a little too much space at times, and the film occasionally brushes up against the old habit of centering a white ally inside a Black story. Even so, Levi works against his natural buoyancy in useful ways. He dirties up his easy charm, lowers his energy, and lets Bert move with the shabbier opportunism of a man looking for a fast score. When he finally begins to recognize Sarah’s dignity as something greater than profit, Levi plays the change physically more than verbally. He stands differently around her. The respect shows up in posture before it ever reaches dialogue. *Sarah's Oil* is gentler than its subject deserves, but as a tribute to a girl who looked at bad land and saw possibility, it has a quiet conviction.