Jessica Chastain plays a country singer who quit being famous in Heartland, the Netflix mystery thriller written and directed by Shana Feste, and the film hands her a reason to stop hiding: her niece Charlie Heart, a singer on the way up, has disappeared in Nashville. Misty Jones is no detective. She once sat at the top of the same business her niece was trying to climb, and going after the girl means walking back into the rooms she walked out of.

Netflix’s synopsis is short and pointed. Misty comes out of seclusion to investigate the disappearance, and the search uncovers a murky side of the city where no one, herself included, is who they seem. That last clause carries more weight than the missing-person hook. The premise sets up a noir in which the investigator is also one of the people hiding something, and the case keeps pulling her own past back into view. Feste has said she wanted to look at Nashville from a film-noir perspective, with a complicated and deeply flawed woman at the center, and the setup follows that plan on paper. The woman who would normally be the glamorous mystery at the edge of a noir becomes the one asking the questions.

The casting leans on people who know the city from the inside. Carter Faith, a country singer-songwriter, makes her screen acting debut as Charlie Heart, the niece whose absence drives the plot. Jennifer Nettles, the voice of Sugarland, plays Winnie Jo Lean. Garrett Hedlund, who starred in Feste’s Country Strong, comes back to her version of Nashville as Roy Combs. John Hawkes plays Clark and Ross Lynch plays Jace, and the ensemble also includes Paul Sparks, Ben Dickey, Isabelle Kusman, Wynn Everett, Hill Harper and Norbert Leo Butz. Two of the leads, Faith and Nettles, have spent their careers in the industry the film is about, which gives the missing-singer story a layer of casting that a generic thriller would not have.

For Chastain, this is a return to ground she covered as Tammy Wynette opposite Michael Shannon‘s George Jones in George & Tammy, the miniseries that earned her an Emmy nomination. She has said that playing Wynette gave her a head start with Misty, because she had already spent time inside the working life of a country star. The angle is different this time. George & Tammy was a biography of a marriage lived in public, built on real songs and real lives. Heartland, by its own description, is about a fictional star who stepped out of public view and now has to read the business as an outsider, asking the questions she once had people around her to answer.

Feste has been to this town before. Country Strong, her earlier film with Gwyneth Paltrow and Tim McGraw, followed a fallen country star trying to get back on stage, with Hedlund as the young singer in her orbit. Heartland keeps the city and the figure of the star who has lost her place in it, but trades the comeback melodrama for a missing-person case. The earlier film asked whether a broken star could sing again. This one starts from a star who decided not to, and makes her go back anyway for someone else.

The songs are not set dressing. Netflix Music is releasing a 15-track soundtrack album alongside the film, and much of it is sung by the cast. The title track, a cover of a song originally written and recorded by Hailey Whitters, is performed by Chastain with Nettles. Faith sings “Still the Sparrow Sings” and “Honeycomb”, Lynch sings “Heartbreak Country”, Hawkes duets with Margo Price on “Too Late For Coffee, Too Early for Beer”, and Chastain and Hawkes share “Shouldn’t Have Called”. Carly Pearce and Channing Wilson also appear, and the writing credits run through Nashville songwriters such as Jessi Alexander, Hillary Lindsey and Don Schlitz, alongside writing credits for George Jones and Roger Miller.

Several tracks are credited to the fictional characters themselves. “The Night We Met” belongs to Jace Jacobs and Charlie Heart, “Shut Up & Ride” to the Heart Sisters, and one song credited to Charlie Heart alone is titled “Die With A Secret”. The track list suggests the film builds an in-world catalogue for its missing singer, so that the audience hears the voice the story is searching for. Randall Poster, one of the film’s producers, supervised the music; his credits include Skyfall and The Wolf of Wall Street. The score comes from Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, the duo behind the music for Ozark.

The setting brings its own history. Nashville runs on young voices, and the treatment of women on country radio has been an open argument in the industry for years, sharpened more than a decade ago when a radio consultant told a trade publication that female artists were the tomatoes in country radio’s salad rather than the lettuce. A story in which a rising female singer vanishes, and the person who goes looking is a woman who got out, reads as a comment on that machine before a single scene has been screened. Whether Feste follows that thread or stays inside the whodunit is something the premise points toward but cannot confirm.

There is also the question of genre. Country music has produced plenty of rise-and-fall dramas, from Robert Altman’s Nashville to Crazy Heart, but far fewer crime stories. Placing a noir structure, with its compromised investigator and its city full of people who are not what they seem, inside the business of Music Row is the real proposition here. The industry already trades in personas, stage names and carefully managed pasts, which makes it a natural home for a story where everyone, the heroine included, is performing a version of themselves.

Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Nettles in Heartland — Jessica Chastain as Misty Jones and Jennifer Nettles as Winnie Jo Lean in Heartland. Photo: Tina Rowden / Netflix © 2026

That leaves the question the premise opens and no plot can close. Misty goes looking for one missing girl, but she is herself someone the business stopped hearing, by choice or not. Heartland can find Charlie Heart or fail to. What a town built on selling young women’s voices owes the ones it stops listening to is not the kind of question an ending answers.

Heartland premieres worldwide on Netflix on November 13, 2026. It is a feature film, not a series. Feste wrote the screenplay herself, and Netflix presents it as an original story rather than an account of a real case. Producers are Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping of Chernin Entertainment, Jason Owen and Randall Poster, with Chernin Entertainment and Sandbox among the production companies. Although the story is set in Nashville, the film was shot in Atlanta at Shadowbox Studios. It is rated R in the United States for language, some violence and brief sexual content. The soundtrack album arrives on Netflix Music the same day, and the title track performed by Chastain and Nettles is already out.