‘The Weight’: A Gritty Ethan Hawke Leads a Muscular and Exciting Depression-Era Thriller

You can’t judge a movie by its release anymore. If you look at The Weight, a film that premiered at Sundance, starring an Oscar-nominee (Ethan Hawke) and an Oscar-winner (Russell Crowe), with a period setting, you could be forgiven for mistaking it as a prestige drama. But Padriac McKinley’s movie isn’t aiming for awards; it’s aiming for thrills, and it hits its target bang-on. A film firmly in the vein of perilous journeys like Sorcerer and The Grey, The Weight knows how to walk the tightrope of tense situations melded with genre comforts. Moreover, the script wisely sidesteps the familiar without making outlandish turns. There may not be any rich themes beneath the surface, but the suspense that runs throughout The Weight is pure gold.

Samuel Murphy (Hawke) is trying to support his young daughter Penny (Avy Berry) in Eugene, Oregon, in 1933. The Depression means he can’t make much of a living, and while looking for a cheaper rooming house, he’s set upon by some dirty cops. Fighting back to protect his daughter, Murphy is sent away, and if he doesn’t get out in a month, his daughter will be put up for adoption. While incarcerated, Murphy’s ingenuity as a mechanic, engineer, and former WWI soldier catches the eye of Clancy (Crowe), a boss running the penitentiary’s work program. Clancy makes a deal with Murphy: go to a nearby mine to transport some gold before FDR confiscates it, and Clancy will sign a full release for Murphy and three fellow convicts who assist in the transport. Murphy chooses the sweet-natured Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), socialist Singh (Avi Nash), and malcontent Rankin (Austin Amelio) for the mission. If they lose even one bar of gold, there is no deal. To further complicate matters, the armed guards accompanying the convicts, Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgress), are untrustworthy goons, and the group also picks up Anna (Julia Jones), an indigenous woman looking to escape life at the mining camp.

These are a good set of complications that the film further compounds in an episodic manner by throwing various threats across the Oregon wilderness. Early in their trip, the group encounters a rickety bridge, and it clearly won’t support the weight of anyone hauling a backpack of gold bars. This leads to an imaginative and wonderfully tense scene of guys throwing bricks to Murphy in the middle of the bridge, him needing to catch them, and then tossing them to the other side. It’s so simple, but that simplicity is part of why The Weight works so well. Because the film is so efficient in its first act of setting up the characters, the stakes, and the world, it can reap the rewards when the mission is underway. We know what those gold bars mean, and we know that for Murphy, to drop one means he’ll never see his daughter again.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt having Hawke at the forefront of the action. When you watch Hawke, you see a guy who has been acting since he was fourteen, and over forty years later, he’s still getting better. And it’s not like he was ever bad! But he’s aged gracefully into more mature roles that require more gravitas. Rather than chasing youth like some of his contemporaries, a character like Murphy feels lived-in as Hawke leans into his middle age without losing any vibrancy or energy. Sure, he can still do fun stuff like the Black Phone movies, but if American arthouse cinema has ever had a heavyweight who is as reliable as they come, it’s Ethan Hawke.

The rest of the cast acquits themselves well, and the film knowingly plays with archetypes to set expectations it sometimes fulfills and other times upends. Even the more tepid aspects, like a minor romantic connection between Murphy and Anna, don’t detract from the larger momentum of how these societal outcasts are depending on each other while it’s the authority figures who must be met with suspicion. We’ve seen this dynamic before, but The Weight handles it well, especially in its action scenes where there’s a nice iris effect as if the frame itself is threatening to collapse under the perils of rapids, harsh weather, and hill people. 

In better times, a movie like this would easily receive a wide release and pull in a respectable sum at the box office. But now, because this isn’t IP nor is it driven by VFX spectacle, it will likely be a quiet theatrical release followed by people discovering it on streaming in the next 6-24 months. And I can’t control how people come to movies nor how distribution works in 2026, but it would be a shame to miss out on such an entertaining and straightforward thriller. The Weight isn’t a heavy movie, but it doesn’t have to be, nor should it be, given the story. It’s a gripping tale that sets its stakes and threats perfectly and then lets the audience enjoy the ride.

The Weight opens in theaters on September 18.

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