The Rivals of Amziah King Review: Voice of the Beehive

Every kind of farming takes a different mentality. Crops need constant attention. Pigs will turn on you in a second. But if your crop is honey, it’s all about patience. Can’t make the flowers bloom, can’t make the bees fly.

Maybe that’s why the few films about apiarists demand a lead performance that’s both burly and thoughtful. Peter Fonda as beekeeper Ulysses in Ulee’s Gold put everything about his character into how he drank a glass of water. While The Rivals of Amziah King doesn’t present that kind of tiny, impactful character beat for Matthew McConaughey, it does give him the space for one of his career-best performances as Amziah King.

The honey harvester arrives like a redneck rock star, swaggering out of his beat-up pickup and launching into a rambunctious impromptu outdoor concert with his friends. Under the sign of the Ulysses’ drive-in diner (the name a seeming nod from writer/director Andrew Patterson to Victor Nuñez’s Ulee’s Gold), he’s a charmer and a magnet, but there’s a trait to him we normally don’t see from McConaughey’s performances. Amziah is kind above all things, and that’s clear the moment he sees Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), a woman who he had fostered a decade earlier before she disappeared from his life in the saddest of circumstances.

Little is explicitly stated. Yet the paternal glow from Amziah, reciprocated by Kateri’s smile when he throws his doors open for her, it’s Biblical, mythical, life-affirming joy, even if there are hints of darkness at the edge of their world. 

Amidst the heartfelt delight and madcap fun, there’s also a somewhat epic scale that comes from McConaughey presenting King as the epitome of the backwoods philosopher-king. He’s not the only big personality out here, since everyone someways or other has got crossways with malevolent business tycoon Dob McCoy (Kurt Russell). Dob is everything Amziah isn’t, the pair mirror images yet always separated.

The first hour of The Rivals, as Amziah brings Kateri back into his community and into the beekeeping business, is more refreshing than a cold swimming hole on a hot day. Hilarious and touching by turns, it’s an amplified yet somehow naturalistic depiction of rural Oklahoma life that’s half Hixploitation, half Frederick Wiseman. There’s a giddy exuberance that captures the unexpected wildness of farm life, from hijinks with a rogue swarm to the seemingly constant background roar of Red Dirt classics. There are even some shocking moments that feel like the kind of story you look back on 10 years later and laugh about. Much as with his debut, period sci-fi chiller, The Vast of Night, Patterson crafts a sense of place and time that seeps from its pores like sweat from a long day in the fields. He depicts a community where most folks are one traffic stop away from a few months in the slammer, a place of potlucks and parole violations, where your shoeless neighbor and your attorney are both in your band. But why would the beloved Amziah need an attorney? And where are all these so-called rivals?

The second act becomes a very different film, in which Kateri asks herself what it takes to become a big presence like Amziah or Dob. This is when first-timer LookingGlass truly shines, and Patterson subtly explores his core metaphor, of such characters being the queen bee to their hive. The ways that Amziah and Dob have changed their worlds become clear through her choices as she defines her role in this place, and comprehends what being part of the hive means. When she and Amziah stand in fields full of real bees – no CG or AI here, folks – these are moments filled with the raw wonder of connection.

The Rivals of Amziah King

2026, PG-13, 131 min. Directed by Andrew Patterson. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Angelina LookingGlass, Kurt Russell, Scott Shepherd, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori, Cole Sprouse.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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