Tabatha Zimiga trains horses for a living. In her spare time, she raises wayward teens, too. This powerful docudrama feels honest and raw, but that cuts both ways. The people we meet here exemplify resilience, but the scars they carry and the profanities they utter aren’t for the squeamish.
We forget.
Those of us who live in worlds of streetlights and subways, where a chain coffee store seems always a block away, we forget. We forget that the world still holds half-tamed places, where knee-high grass stretches past the horizon. Kingdoms of wild horses and dirty trucks; days filled with sweat and strained muscles, nights spent around firepits by the barn.
Tabatha Zimiga lives in this forgotten world. She shares that life, and her 3,000-acre ranch, with forgotten children: Cast-off teens whose natural parents can’t afford them or simply don’t care.
Tabatha ekes out a living training and selling horses—sometimes at auction yards, sometimes on TikTok. Because even out here, you gotta keep up with the times. But horses aren’t selling for what they should. Seems like Tabatha’s taking in more kids and less income every month.
Roy Waters, a horse peddler from Fort Worth, steps into Tabatha’s world. He takes a paternal shine to Tabatha’s talented daughter, Porshia. He looks at the ranch and sees unfenced potential. And one afternoon, he makes an incredible offer. He wants to buy the ranch.
Roy says he’s willing to pay well for it. Oh, and he’ll let Tabatha and the kids stay there, too. Their lives will go on just as before. Only now, she—and they—will be working for him.
“I’m not asking for an answer right now,” he says. “Why don’t we try it out, see how it fits.”
Roy’s offer feels like a much-needed lifeline. But Tabatha worries that this seeming gift from above might be a bomb instead.
Early on in the film, Tabatha talks with a young teen named Brynn as she steps out of an unfamiliar boy’s car. “Where’s your mom?” Tabatha asks.
“She hasn’t been around for a few days,” Brynn says. Then she asks if Tabatha might have room at her place for tonight. Tabatha takes her in, and Brynn remains on the ranch for the rest of the movie. The only time we see Brynn’s mom is in a bar, where she asks if Tabatha can keep Brynn for a bit longer. “She just loves you,” the mom says, promising to drop off some cash—once she has some.
Tabatha isn’t perfect; she’d be the first to admit that. But these exchanges illustrate something important: When these teens have nowhere else to go, they find a home with Tabby. She offers a layer of protection from those unfamiliar boys. She offers food and work and a bit of discipline. When she learns that another teen living with her (Jesse) is going to have to repeat a grade because he’s been skipping school, she lets him have it.
“We’re not playing them games here,” she tells him. “You live here, you’re following my f—ing rules.”
“Yeah,” Jesse says. “That’s a big reason why I want to live here.” (We soon learn that Jesse would very much like Tabby to become his legal guardian.)
While Tabby’s relationship with her surrogate kids seems solid enough, she and her biological daughter, Porshia, have a more difficult relationship. A lot of that is because they’ve both been party to almost unimaginable trauma (which we’ll get into down below). Drill down into the marrow of East of Wall, and you discover that the film is about reconciliation in the midst of grief and anger. And that, in itself, is a nice message.
We learn that Tabby’s late husband, John, was a Christian, and that he was afraid of going to hell.
Tabby is very good with horses. “She can diagnose a horse in two minutes,” someone marvels, watching her work. “My wife thinks she’s a witch.” Roy calls Porschia a witch, too, after Porschia correctly guesses a secret. Someone wears a necklace with a cross on it.
Tabby wears some outfits that show a lot of cleavage, and we hear that she had her first baby when she wasn’t much older than the teenage Porshia. “Babies having babies,” Tabby’s mother, Tracey, says.
Tabby’s now with another guy, Clay, but it doesn’t seem like the two are married. “Tabby hired me as a horse trainer,” he tells someone. “I guess I had a hard time leaving.”
Two of Tabby’s resident teens, Jesse and a girl named Ryder, seem to be a couple. A teen girl wears either a bikini top or a bra outside. Jesse wears a shirt that makes a suggestive reference about his male anatomy.
Roy seems drawn to Porschia, and he gives her a couple of pretty expensive gifts—both of which made me initially wonder whether he was harboring some creepily inappropriate feelings for her. But we eventually learn that she simply reminds him of his own daughter.
Tabby’s mother, Tracey, is a terrible babysitter. She and Tabby’s 3-year-old son, Stetson, watch a horrific, bloody horror movie on TV—with Tracey reassuring Stetson that the action on the screen isn’t real. (Blood spatters across one of the actors as she talks.) When Tabby comes in and takes exception to letting her son watch such images, Tracey says, “Calm down. He’s seen it before.”
That television blood—and a few tumbles off bucking horses—is about the only real violence we see. But we hear about plenty more.
[Note: Spoilers are contained in the rest of this section.]
We know early on that Tabby’s husband, John, died unexpectedly. We suspect it’s suicide, but only at the end of the film do we get confirmation. Tabby tearfully (and graphically) tells her friends what it was like to find the body and then to clean up the mess. Someone spends the night in the truck where John killed himself—one with a huge bullet hole in a side window.
Roy’s daughter also died by suicide.
Tracey admits that she used to beat Tabby. She shares her own painful story of when Tabby’s father accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun. “What was my first thought?” she recalls. “Slap Tabby. “F—er’s bleeding out, [and] I’m hitting my kid.”
Other women share their own stories of abuse. One recalls how her husband shot her when their daughter was only 2, then after another struggle, “hit me in the head with the nine-millimeter gun.” She says that in the subsequent divorce, the courts gave custody of her daughter to her abusive ex; now her daughter’s all grown up and living with her own abusive spouse, and “she thinks that’s love.”
About 65 f-words and about half as many s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch” and “h—.” God’s named is paired with “d–n” about six times. Jesus name is abused twice. We hear the word “p—ed.” We see several crude hand gestures.
We hear that Tracey makes the best moonshine around, and we see several people drink from jars filled with the stuff. Tracey always seems to have a bottle of beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Other adults drink frequently, and one talks about how she spent an evening “marking” her property—urinating around the perimeter and then refilling herself with beer. A man in Tabby’s employ seems perpetually tipsy.
A teen boy, Skyler, suggests to Jesse that they sneak into Tracey’s house and steal some alcohol. “You don’t even drink, Skyler!” another teen points out. Ryder smokes, and she sometimes takes a drag from Tracey’s cigarette.
Tabatha appears to chew tobacco, and she goes to a bar a few times. But I’m not sure if we ever see her drink alcohol; one night around a campfire, when everyone else has a beer in hand, she conspicuously sips water.
Tabby’s no angel, and neither are her “kids.” One is in trouble for stealing 10 dollars. “I gave it back,” he complains. Jesse skipped so much school that he’ll need to repeat 11th grade; he’s also got a court date for a misdemeanor charge. Several girls under Tabby’s care sneak out in the middle of the night and steal traffic barrels. (When a furious Tabby discovers the deed the next morning, they say they only wanted the barrels to practice for the next big rodeo.)
Tabby forces Porshia to go buy stuff at a grocery store: She owes the store too much money to go in herself. “I’ll pay the tab next week,” she tells Porschia.
When Tabby questions a babysitting Tracey why Stetson’s eating candy (which he’s not supposed to have), Tracey says (using more colorful language) that she bribed him with it to get him to go to the bathroom.
We’ve seen films blend fiction with reality. Nomadland set Oscar-winning Frances McDormand in the midst of real-life nomads, and the film drove away with a Best Picture Academy Award. Sing Sing put Colman Domingo in the middle of prison and cast of real-world former inmates as his co-stars.
East of Wall takes that vibe one step farther: Here, the docudrama’s “stars” play variations of themselves. Tabatha Zimiga really does sell horses on TikTok and play den mother to a bevy of teens. Daughter Porshia really does race barrels. The movie’s few trained actors are strictly in supporting roles.
That gives East of Wall a gritty, poignant authenticity—and that cuts both ways.
The movie takes place near the South Dakota Badlands, a place of stark, eerie beauty. Porshia talks about how it’s a land filled with ancient scars. That setting serves as a metaphor for the characters we meet—all scarred in their own ways, all reaching for a hint of healing. Our protagonists live in an unforgiving land. And, haltingly, they’re learning to forgive—themselves, each other, the people who hurt them the most. And if they’re unable to forgive, at least they’re slowly grasping for ways to move on.
But in its raw honesty, the movie is unforgiving, too. We learn what made those scars in painful detail. The language we hear may be true to the story—but that doesn’t ameliorate its brutal frequency. We can learn a lot about resilience from the real-ish characters we see. But to emulate them in other ways would feel as though we’re begging for scars of our own.
East of Wall is a creative, poignant film, and the people we meet here are memorable. But the film’s problematic content? Those elements we’d rather forget.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
