This film scrutinizes the American West’s legacy of settlers who fenced and tamed the open range. An array of characters inhabits the elegantly filmed landscapes, among them barbed wire enthusiasts whose depth of knowledge both attracts and repels. A relentless American inventiveness improves on classic barbed wire to create increasingly aggressive variants; a razor-wire factory owner, for example, tells us that his product is popular for military, prison, and security uses all over the world. The elliptical and carefully paced story builds inexorably toward taller fences and more painful wire. Horizontal tracking shots suggest the character of the western plains and mimic the trains and roadways that traverse the region, while the ingenious use of natural sound contributes to the themes of fencing and subdividing vast American spaces. Migrants who cross from Mexico to the United States by walking through the desert are among those affected, and we learn about them through an anthropologist’s cataloging of the possessions they carried.  NK