"The Weight"

☆☆☆☆

There is a brutal physicality to The Weight that is both impressive and difficult to watch. I don’t know with any certainty how much the film relies on CG or modern visual-effects technology, but it seems very little — this is a movie that feels grounded in a harsh and unforgiving reality.

The Weight is both a serious and moody Depression-era drama about the lengths desperate people will go to in order to survive; and it’s a captivating and at times almost unbearably tense heist and adventure film. It might not have quite the ineffable gravitas of The Revenant, but it’s still an intense and fulfilling work.
 
Ethan Hawke stars as Samuel Murphy, a single father struggling to make ends meet at the height of the Great Depression. Evicted from his apartment, he even has to sell his daughter’s precious teddy bear for few quick cents. Searching for an apartment in a seedy area of Eugene, Oregon, Murphy is attacked by crooked cops, thrown in jail and separated from his daughter.
 
He soon finds himself in a prison work camp, and the movie’s specific 1933 setting becomes deeply important. The camp’s warden (Russell Crowe) makes him an offer: He can arrange to help Murphy get released from prison in time to get his daughter back from the state if he helps out with a little plan.
Franklin D. Roosevelt is about to seize all private gold, and some of the shady people who run the local gold mine want to liberate it before that can happen.

Murphy and three other prisoners — along with Anna (Julia Jones), a Native American woman trying to escape the harsh mining camp — will carry the gold 50 miles through the unforgiving wilderness to a drop point. They’ve got five days.

The challenges they face are harsh and extraordinary. Director Padraic McKinley shoots all of it with both cool dispassion and maximum tension. An effort to get the heavy gold bars over a rope bridge; a race against a river logjam that comes dangerously unjammed at the worst possible time; an encounter with a suspicious miner; and some excruciating business involving a wedding ring and a broken finger are harrowing, sometimes cringe-inducing highlights.

There’s also an impossibly tense sequence set during a rainstorm that strips cinema to its barest essentials: light and sound. It’s an extraordinary scene, masterfully conceived, shot and edited, that on its own is worth seeing.

The movie as a whole feels a little like Wages of Fear meets The Revenant, but if the individual beats sometimes feel overly familiar, the performances — Hawke, Jones and Crowe, in particular — and the movie’s impressive, meticulous production design compensate. (The movie, it's interesting to note, was shot not in the Pacific Northwest but in the massive forests of Bavaria.)
 
It’s a movie that genuinely tests just how much an audience can take, but generally stays on the right side of that difficult line. For those craving an honest, physical, intensely real movie in a sea of digital trickery, The Weight is uncommonly satisfying.

Viewed September 20, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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