This is Pike County
★★★★½
“This Is Pike County (2025)”
Film Review by Don Iannone
This Is Pike County, directed by Laura Paglin and produced with Thomas Lennon, was shown at the 16th Annual Chagrin Documentary Film Festival in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where it stood out as a haunting and deeply human portrait of contemporary rural America.
In This Is Pike County, Paglin, who resides in nearby Cleveland Heights, turns her lens toward a corner of America that much of the nation has forgotten yet continues to define its conscience. Set in Pike County, Ohio, a rural Appalachian community marked by both pride and pain, the film begins with the 2016 murders of eight members of the Rhoden family. This tragedy once captured national headlines. But rather than sensationalize the crime or mine it for drama, Paglin does something far more profound: she listens. Out of silence, she draws a portrait of endurance and identity in a place where both are under siege.
The County as Protagonist
Paglin makes it clear from the first frame that her film’s true protagonist is not an individual but Pike County itself. The opening scenes—children by the roadside, prison workers collecting trash, the discovery of used needles and meth-lab packets—form an unflinching visual prologue. The camera does not look away. It moves slowly, registering the small, painful details of a community in recovery from both literal and spiritual contamination.
As the film unfolds, we hear a gathered crowd singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Their voices echo with hollow patriotism, a haunting reminder that even national symbols can sound fragile when sung against the backdrop of loss. People light candles for the dead, cling to fading rituals of pride, and talk about the 2016 Rhoden family murders as if still trying to make sense of an open wound that never healed.
The camera drifts through empty storefronts and downtown conversations—people smoking, talking, drinking coffee, watching life go by. Children chase monarch butterflies through fields that once supported families. They laugh, then scream in fear at the sight of a spider. The film captures, in a single gesture, the innocence and terror of growing up in a place where danger feels as familiar as the land itself.
A Place Shaped by Industry and Abandonment
Pike County’s history runs deep beneath its soil. For nearly half a century, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant—a Cold War–era uranium enrichment facility—was the region’s economic heart. From 1954 to 2001, it offered stable work and civic pride. But when it closed, it left behind contamination and despair, a ghostly inheritance of the atomic age. Paglin’s camera doesn’t lecture; it observes the quiet persistence of memory. The plant’s legacy still defines local identity, even as residents now face a new threat: a proposed radioactive waste dump that would again put profit over people.
A woman speaking at Piketon High School warns about the dangers of that plan. Her voice trembles not with fear but with weary determination. In her eyes, and in the faces of the teenagers listening, we see the central tension of the film: a community forced to bear the costs of progress without ever reaping its benefits.
Cycles of Despair and Survival
Paglin’s portrait is unsparing yet deeply humane. The film records the repetition of hardship: men dying young from overdoses, girls becoming mothers too soon, women hoping for men who will stay. The conversations are frank, sometimes painfully so. A 13-year-old girl named Lily asks her mother what she would do if she became pregnant. The question lands like a stone dropped into still water, its ripples touching everything around it.
The women of Pike County, many with bright nails, flip flops, and worn faces, speak of love and survival in the same breath. They are caught in a cycle of dependency that feels older than they are. Yet Paglin’s gaze never reduces them to victims. She gives them space, and in that space they reveal strength, an endurance that borders on the sacred.
The film’s texture is filled with the small details of daily life: parades where children scoop up hard candy thrown from floats; teenagers building off-road and go-cart vehicles in makeshift garages; a high-school track coach urging his boys to believe in themselves; smokers standing outside gas stations, bound by habit and companionship. Each scene, in its ordinariness, becomes an emblem of survival.
Echoes of an Earlier Ohio
Watching these scenes, I couldn't help but recall the Appalachian Ohio of my youth, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Belmont County, where steel and coal had reigned for a century. While some things have improved, the deep roots of deprivation remain, and in some ways they are worse, because drugs and crime have replaced the old mill jobs and coal mines that at least offered dignity and stability. Children in Pike County today, like those I once knew, grow up too quickly. They learn the intimate details of their mothers’ cancers. They carry the burdens of broken families that should belong to adults.
In that sense, This Is Pike County is not just a film about one place; it is a time capsule of the region’s enduring struggle, a reminder of how economic decline, limited educational attainment, superstition, and generational insecurities become psychological inheritance.
Paglin’s Eye: Listening Instead of Selling
During the question-and-answer session following the screening, Laura Paglin clarified her intent with disarming candor: “This is not a Chamber of Commerce type film,” she said. “It’s a story of human interest.”
That statement perfectly encapsulates the film’s moral and artistic stance. This is Pike County, which offers no glossy images for tourism brochures, no sentimental myths of small-town wholesomeness. Paglin isn’t selling the county; she’s listening to it. She gives voice to the people who live in its shadows and refuses to edit their truth into something more comfortable.
Her empathy is apparent in her method. She allows silence to breathe, faces to linger, and contradictions to coexist. The result is not despairing but deeply human. In a time when media coverage often reduces rural America to caricature, either nostalgic innocence or ignorant rage, Paglin restores nuance and tenderness.
The Geography of Poverty
Pike County stands as a microcosm of post-industrial rural America, a place hollowed out by extraction, neglect, and abandonment. But the film also invites a broader reflection on the parallels between rural and urban poverty. Both reveal communities that have been stripped of opportunity and coherence. The differences are cultural rather than existential: in the city, poverty crowds people together and makes them invisible through excess; in the country, it isolates them and makes them invisible through distance.
Urban poverty often hides beneath noise and motion. Rural poverty hides beneath silence and pride. Both, in their own ways, are forms of exile from power, from attention, from belonging. Paglin’s film makes that exile visible.
Rituals, Resistance, and the Persistence of Place
Paglin’s direction gives equal weight to beauty and ruin. The act of smoking, for instance, becomes ritual, part habit, part defiance, part communion. County fairs, church services, and candlelight vigils feel both sacred and desperate. Even sugar becomes a character, a small pleasure in a culture of scarcity. These rituals of endurance are the film’s quiet miracles.
And yet, the county’s tragedy is not just economic; it is spiritual erosion, the slow draining away of purpose, despite the hopes they pin on a God on High. Pike County is what happens when generations of extraction, poverty, and neglect hollow out a place almost to its soul. Paglin doesn’t say this aloud; she lets the landscape say it for her.
Paglin’s Achievement
Laura Paglin deserves high recognition for her artistry and her moral clarity. By refusing to polish or pity, she achieves something rare: a film that is both unflinching and compassionate. Her collaboration with Thomas Lennon brings narrative discipline without compromising intimacy.
In tone and vision, This Is Pike County belongs alongside the great humanist documentaries of American life—from Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA to Robert Frank’s The Americans. But Paglin’s voice is her own: patient, rooted in quiet attention. She dignifies her subjects not through rhetoric but through presence.
Endurance as the Last Story
By its final scenes, the viewer understands that This Is Pike County is not about tragedy at all. It is about endurance; about the capacity to hold on when every structure meant to support you has failed. The film closes as it began: with the land itself, children still playing, people still surviving, the hills and fields bearing witness.
For all its sorrow, this is a film of grace. It asks what keeps people tethered to a place when opportunity has vanished. And in the end, the answer is simple and profound: love, memory, pride, and the stubborn will to keep living.
Congratulations to Laura Paglin for giving us not a Chamber of Commerce portrait, but something far rarer: a story of human interest in the truest sense, told with patience, empathy, and moral courage. This Is Pike County listens to the forgotten and lets them speak, transforming silence into testimony and despair into endurance.
~Don Iannone is a fiction and nonfiction writer and poet in the Chagrin Falls area. He grew up in Belmont County, Ohio, a part of the larger Appalachian Region. He and his wife, Mary, are supporters of the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival. Don expects his new book, Cleveland’s Flats: A Symphonic Essay in Black and White, to be released in early November. The book contains two decades of Don’s photographs of the Flats, accompanied by essays and poems.
