THE WEIGHT
2026
Directed by Padraic McKinley
Written by Matthew Booi, Leo Scherman, Matthew Chapman, and Shelby Gaines
I want to be clear that I like The Weight, which I feel is important to establish upfront when I have a premonition that it's going to sound like I only have complaints. We're going to start out, anyway, with something that will definitely sound like a complaint, and maybe to some degree it is: The Weight is the most God-damnedly schematic movie imaginable, just astoundingly so, so predictable even in its, ahem, "twists" (if we give ourselves a concussion, and accept this framing of its plot's turns) that I had come to suspect that the actual twist was that our protagonist must've figured it out immediately, with the characters with the word "protagonist's friend" stamped on their heads figuring it out on their own not too terribly long thereafter. That undoubtedly suggests the other way it's schematic, with very nearly its entire cast marked as "good guy" or "bad guy" (with precisely one figure here whose moral alignment might be in question for any of these 113 minutes, so that the only even-medium-sized surprise here is that he turns out to be good when you've been, sort of, primed to think he's the kind of dipshit who'd betray them, though it is also the case that the bad guys don't give him much chance to, so it's less like he made a bravely unexpected choice than he wound up on Team Happy Ending by default). The emphatic way the movie goes about dividing its world into stygian blackhats and blindingly-bright whitehats is, frankly, a little bit wild, considering what the movie's about is a bunch of prisoners and, often enough, about what they did to get imprisoned (yet even with everyone else—always sympathetic if not out-and-out innocent!—getting their backstory module, I don't believe we're ever told in so much as general terms what crime the dipshit committed, possibly because his was actually bad, and it's such a glaring structural omission it's almost funny).
It's slightly sour, then: The Weight was shot and scored and directed and performed (and marketed—hell, titled) in the vein of "how far would you go? what lines would you cross?", in a way that made it seem like this noirishly-Western-like thriller was after something morally complex, if not something potentially gnarly and hardcore; yet, truth be told, at no point is anybody even asked to make "a moral choice" (even a schematic one!), so you somewhat wonder how such topflight acting talent was ever attracted to the marquee roles of a rote B-adventure picture anyway. Not that I begrudge that talent's presence (nor, by any means, the good acting from non-big-names all over the film)—nor, for that matter, the existence of a rote B-adventure picture, as I am a sufficiently-big booster of such things that I decided on my second pass of these opening paragraphs to use the more negatively-connotated "schematic" in place of the word "straightforward"—but it's conceivable Ethan Hawke just wanted to go on a hike in Bavaria.
So, in Oregon, in 1933 (and it's not a bad stand-in, as it never really occurred to me it wasn't filmed in America, though maybe it should have*), we have our man, Samuel Murphy (Hawke), widower father to young Penny (Avy Berry) and victim to this Great Depression, so that Murphy and his daughter return to their apartment to find they've been evicted, then, while trying to find a new place, get confused for burglars by a clutch of plainclothes cops, who in turn get confused, by Murphy, for muggers. Thus is Murphy wrenched away from his daughter; the next time we see him he's carving out roads as prison labor. (Meanwhile, going by the movie's very first scene, in a speeding automobile, you might confuse Murphy with one of the Depression's antiheroic bank robbers; this will turn out to be an in medias res gambit that isn't well-marked as such, and if I had remembered it during the body of the movie, I would've been confused.) The overseer of the gang is one J.J. Clancy, and, upon discovering that in Murphy he has a problem-solving genius when the latter moves an immoveable boulder from the path, Clancy brings Murphy in close, giving him a job so important that, if he succeeds, he promises he'll declare Murphy rehabilitated and get the convict paroled earlier than he (or I, or anyone) would have believed possible, early enough, in fact, to rescue his girl from being shipped off to the orphanage. The job will require three more capable and trustworthy men, and, not having such men, Murphy selects the movie's three previously-established supporting characters instead, Singh (Avi Nash), Olson (Lucas Lynggard Tonneson), and Rankin (Austin Amelio). They're joined by outside muscle Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess), and the job is this: they're to be transported to a mine, where its superintendent (Alec Newman) will hand over the mine's gold bullion—enough, er, mass under the force of gravity, let's say, to task four strong men—so as to deliver it into safekeeping from the totally-real threat of the miners robbing the mine, which has reportedly occurred to a few other area mines recently, with the miners aching to get their hands on gold that's about to become inordinately valuable as a result of Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102. To this end, they spirit the gold off the mine's property, witnessed by none except Anna (Julia Jones), whom they begrudgingly allow to join their party, as the alternatives are less appealing. And so their journey across the trackless wilderness begins.
Anyway, I assume you've gotten ahead of the movie, and to no small degree The Weight really can be criticized for what it's not: not even-slightly a thriller in which four men and one woman trudge ever-forward, scheming to escape the doom they know awaits them; not a story about how the bonds of trust and decency break readily under the weight of gold, nor—though maybe it gets closer to this than anything—how good people can band together, even against temptation; not a giant acting showcase for Hawke, who, given a character whose prize is infinitely more precious to him than gold, and even his own life, must do mental and physical battle against an ensemble who don't share his priorities, though maybe it sometimes feints at this one. And, if you don't know, though I've certainly never kept it a secret, I am a pretty big fan of Ethan Hawke; so make no assumptions that I'm put out by having Hawke here, or saying he's in any respect "bad." On the contrary, he's very good.
But I remain puzzled by what these filmmakers thought they would get out of Hawke, and it's ultimately not much that another similarly-situated actor in his late 50s would've provided, except the basic gravitas of superlative talent—it is, you might've guessed, a fairly heavy performance—and Hawke's specialness isn't really being activated. There is, needless to say, positively none of the subterranean psychological machinery, hidden to the character yet accessible to the audience through the actor, that's the stuff of Hawke's most rewarding performances; nor, of course, much at all of the impulsive boyishness the actor typically brings to his characters whether or not it's camouflage for something else, though, pretty remarkably, it's not totally absent—the most sustained "Hawke qua Hawke" we get is when he's still with Barry, and being convincing as a man unconvincingly lying to his screen daughter about their chances (Barry might actually be giving the second-best performance in this cast, which I don't even mean as a slam!), though, real late in the game, Hawke as we know him reemerges from blood and bruises for a tremendously-Hawkean, gutturally-sarcastic read of the line, "Oh, I'm great." The bulk of Murphy, though, kind of feels like Hawke had slyly asked himself one day, "Hm, but what if I were Josh Brolin?", and the experiment succeeded beyond his wildest ambitions, though I'll leave it to you to decide how optimized that is. Crowe, of course, is a working actor who will just be in stuff, and the villain of a low-budget thriller where it wasn't gonna be him climbing any Bavarian hills, but where he could, perhaps, get a chortle out of a poster trumpeting "HAWKE" and "CROWE," was as good as anything else, though, like I said earlier: there is not a bum note from any actor in this cast, or, at least, not errors not forced by the screenplay. Crowe is still the silver medalist in the adult cast, managing to make his screentime with Hawke inveigling even if I doubt any actor could make Clancy's offer legitimately credible—frankly, the screenplay would be better off telling Murphy and company they're robbing the mine (oh, sorry, I know it's such a shock), as then we're just in an honest conspiracy with each other—but everyone else is perfectly solid, even Amelio, who's been saddled with the most dumbshit irritating character due (explicitly!) to Murphy having failed to makethe acquaintance of more than three other men; he's mostly succeeding at tilting Rankin towards a stupid affability rather than a stupid shrillness.
So that leaves us to talk about what The Weight is, which is that B-adventure movie I described, as good as what sensations it can extract from its scenario and not much more—a movie that I'm sure has more swearing (i.e., any) than would be permitted, but feels in many other respects like a movie "about 1933" that was made in 1934, and not in the pre-Code months of that year, either—concerning a group of people walking through a forest encountering obstacles such as substandard bridges and duplicitous hillbillies (superlative Casey Affleck impersonator Cameron Brady), and my premonition is coming true, because here comes more bitching: director Padraic McKinley is not proving himself a natural at the action-adventure staging his setpieces are asking for. There is that bridge that Murphy and fellows determine isn't likely to hold their, ah, heft when laden with gold; it's undeniably the most outright creative thing in the movie, though it achieves "creativity" mostly by dint of being a product of screenwriters of average intelligence attempting to showcase their hero's preternatural cleverness, while also doing something nobody's ever done in a movie before (and not ripping off The Wages of Fear and/or Sorcerer although they won't mind if these movies occur to you**). Hence it requires prepared adventurers who didn't think of bringing rope with them on their trek across difficult terrain and unreliable infrastructure, though I imagine what'll get your goat is that adding the weight of even a fully-loaded pack of gold to, e.g., Hawke's body would be unlikely to exceed that of the Goddamn frost giant playing Letender, a man of easily 270 pounds whom we, interestingly-enough, are never invited to watch crossing this rickety-ass bridge. (But the galling thing is that it's so carelessly-placed: Murphy's solution to the problem of getting across the bridge, with its emphasis on speed, would make great sense if the party were being presently, as they will be later, chased by somebody.)
And for all that, this is one of The Weight's best-constructed setpieces; get to the log-flume ride setpiece and all you, or at least I, could think about was how much McKinley isn't Christopher Nolan and this isn't Insomnia. The third act gets gunplay, and some of those apparently-still-fashionable long takes, and I swear that McKinley and his editors (Matthew Woolly and, well, Padraic McKinley) actually lose a character during them, so that my assumption, going on ten minutes, was that this was an attempt at artful death that failed, and the guy's not even dead. This is the limit (though a subsequent car chase doesn't seem to realize that old-time automobiles of the same basic color are difficult to distinguish, and it might be sloppily-edited on top of this***), but this kind of spongy storytelling just isn't too alien to anything here if it involves more complexity than "tromp up the hill." (This is McKinley's feature debut, and it feels that way, with his confidence outrunning his experience; but I was frankly surprised to find that he has as much TV under his belt as he does.) I also wonder about what must have happened during the development process: this is a film with those odd "and/ampersand" credits on the "story-by" line, which maybe isn't too unusual or indicative of a dramatic overhaul, though this would be the only movie I could think of offhand that had its screenplay co-written by its co-composer, Shelby Gaines (working on the latter aspect of the movie with his long-time sibling collaborator, Latham Gaines).
So for all I know, in an earlier draft, that guy was dead, and the generous interpretation of the screenplay that wound up getting filmed was that its writers had to scramble to explain its diverse casting, though that's doubtful given that I'd reckon Anna was always intended to be a NiitsÃtapi, and they're basically just there to tokenistically provide eighth grade social studies capsules in lieu of more specified characters. Well, it's probably not something you'd find in the 1934 version of this, as the Hays Code looked unfavorably on identifying bad things about America, but at least Anna's token (residential school) "works"—and did you predict that our feminine contingent will be subject to demeaning demands from the heavies for, like, meal preparation, and this will be a noticeable (indeed, noticeably aggravating) fraction of the movie's dialogue? did you also predict she will be sexually menaced as a plot device? good for you! you get a gold star—whereas Singh is just handled strangely, insisting that his presence is a result of a white clerical error, insofar as I guess somebody read something on Bluesky about United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind and misunderstood it very thoroughly.
So: The Weight doesn't employ its great lead actor to the utmost; everyone in it has to be a fucking idiot for the plot to even work; even spotting it that, it's clumsy and liable to trip over its own feet. What has it got? And this is a little harder to define than its problems, but it's got something, maybe just an enthusiasm for itself, which may sound slightly odd considering it's so glum. I had the thought while watching it, and while I don't know if it's really apt, I'd like to voice it: it's kind of like if somebody saw The Brutalist, or Train Dreams, and decided "okay, but what if this were a dumb genre movie instead?"; and the notion made me smile. So it's sort of raw and ugly without seriously meaning it, in some respects without even superficially pretending to mean it (though it certainly means it when it means it, if you'll follow me), and for all his foibles McKinley has attacked the movie with verve and vigor and it's a fast-paced, compellingly-watchable thing even as you're aware of its many weaknesses. A lot of this, and it's probably where the Brutalist comparison entered my head (unless it's just the fact of a lot of exposed rock or the subliminal effect of Mitteleuropan-pretending-to-be-American location shooting), is the Gainses's score, the Gainses being, it turns out, longtime pals of Hawke's (Hawke's Under the Influence company was one of the numerous production firms), mostly in live theatre, curiously enough, though sometimes, as here, movies; and the Gainses, known for "sound sculpture," have probably molded The Weight more thoroughly than anyone else involved (even without appealing to S. Gaines as a co-writer, though obviously there is that), using their music, if you we deign to call it music, to bend the film into the same shape as its collection of sharp, jutting sonic angles, and it's terrific in its unpleasantness.
Only slightly less important is cinematographer Matteo Cocco, who is doing some weird stuff, but slowly building up to it—The Weight starts a pretty-normally "severe period piece," with slightly better, more natural color-grading than usual, but still very "IT'S THE 1930s, AND IT WAS FUCKING GRAY"—and The Weight never really becomes colorful, but once we're out in the boonies, the sapping of the natural world's color into those iron skies really begins to take an emotional toll. And that's not "the weird stuff." That's little fillips, like the bug-eyed Revenant-style Lubezkist outdoor photography, or a gonzo shot of Hawke that, through some lens trickery, makes him appear like a double-exposed ghost, or an exquisite use of firelight channeling all that severity Hawke's putting into his performance, so that he appears aflame, or (in another shot) that his eyes burn—maybe a little hoary, but cool anyway. But a movie would need to be much worse to be "bad" when it has Cocco's centerpiece, a fatalistic scene set during a nighttime storm that is mostly just the pit in your stomach created by the long stretches of pure black screen and the sounds of pummelling rain inside it, thanks to what the lightning is intermittently illuminating between those stretches—murderers getting ever closer to their goal—and it's thrills by way of out-and-out horror. Would that I could give such compliments to everything here, rather than, it's true, only a few things; but that a movie this ramshackle still never collapsed on me must say something good about it, right?
Score: 7/10
*This is one of those indies that highlights how we really need to start a pressure campaign to get funders to waive the appearance of their production company logos if there's going to be two fucking minutes of them before the movie starts, plus another minute of opening credits that recapitulate their names once it does. Anyhow, one of them's "Augenschein Filmproduktion."
**A partial answer to "how schematic is The Weight" could be provided by its sitcom opening-style closing credits, though I think what it's actually riffing on is The Dirty Dozen, a movie it resembles in no way whatsoever besides both involving "convicts."
***There is, also, an anachronistic song at the end—it's Skynyrd—and the insane part is it begins about forty-five seconds before the closing credits do! (And the Pretenders were right there, you know?)
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