‘She Rides Shotgun’ REVIEW: A tiny but mighty indie thriller that is comforting in its familiarity
‘She Rides Shotgun’ REVIEW: A tiny but mighty indie thriller that is comforting in its familiarity
Nathan (Taron Egerton) and Polly (Ana Sophia Heger) take momentary refuge in a truckers’ chapel | Still courtesy of Liongate Studios / IMDb
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: tortured, weathered father figure reconnects with a formerly or increasingly estranged young girl, who may or may not be his daughter, on a trip that will change their lives forever. In the cinematic gallery that proudly displays Paper Moon, Logan, Aftersun, and Leave No Trace, Calm With Horses, auteur Nick Rowland’s newest gritty family drama She Rides Shotgun emerges as an achingly familiar yet deserving newbie among its classic peers.
The film stars Taron Egerton as Nathan McClusky, a gnarled man with a shredded body, shaved head, and jaded mind, whose mint release from prison is marred by a dreaded green light projected onto his loved ones by the Aryan Steel, a white supremacist gang he pissed off behind bars. Now, he must do everything in his power to protect Polly, the daughter he barely knows (played by relative newcomer and bright standout Ana Sophia Heger), from certain death after members of the same gang kill his ex-wife — and the young child’s mother — in cold blood.
The tried-but-true, duo-on-the-run premise is another cinematic convention She Rides Shotgun tries its hand at, betraying the film as one that irrevocably stands on the shoulders of the ones that came before it. But is that necessarily a bad thing? When the beats you know like family are hit in a way that still emotionally resonates, when the performances are so raw and honest that the archetypes become fully-fleshed characters, when the story is so simple yet so assured in its pace, everything else just falls away — the film ceases to be a sky with the same old blue, but a tapestry intimately known and that which emotion and possibility is spread impossibly over.
Taron Egerton and Ana Sophia Heger are the latest cinematic father-daughter pair to tug on your heartstrings | Still courtesy of Liongate Studios / IMDb
Script scribes Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, who collaborated with author of the original novel Jordan Harper, have primarily worked on horror texts before i.e. Super Dark Times, Hellraiser, and The Night House. She Rides Shotgun is their most “conventional” high-profile effort yet, but elements of their masterful suspense and signature poignancy are scattered in the fissures of this dogged indie.
When Nathan first picks up Polly from school after her mother fails to show up, we as the audience are as wary of him as the young girl is. Polly gingerly approaches the beat-up car uncannily akin to that of an abduction scene; in addition, minor, unsettling details like shorted electrical circuits under the wheel make us want to scream at Polly to make a quick and clean escape.
However, as the story unfolds, we soon find out that there are worse horrors lurking outside of the tatty car, namely unrelenting skinheads out for blood, and we quickly realize that, of course, the heart of the film couldn’t have been anything other than the father and daughter at its very core.
Nathan’s rough edges never really get fully smoothed out, and the film never lets us believe that this familial relationship newly forged in fire can burn forever, but it also doesn’t discount the urgency of this connection. The film is a thriller, yes — propulsive and dynamic and full of car chases, shootouts, morally grey cops, morally black cops, and teeth-grinding knuckle sandwiches like any other good thriller, but it also never lets us forget that this is first and foremost about a father and a daughter having each other’s back, even in the worst of circumstances.
The best parts of the film sadly aren’t beloved character actor John Caroll Lynch’s nasty turn as a corrupt sheriff-cum-gang leader known as “The God of Slabtown” or neo-Nazis getting rightfully beaten up by a man on a mission, it’s when Nathan and Polly are left on their own to discover new things about each other that previously got lost in the fray.
Egerton and Heger are amazing in moments of individual fury and agony, but they are at their peak in the few quiet, good times of this film: when father haphazardly dyes daughter’s hair, when daughter one-ups father in basic math during breakfast, when father and daughter muse about religion in a deserted truckers’ chapel whilst daughter helps father with the bloody bullet in his leg.
Ana Sophia Heger as Polly is the film’s shining standout | Still courtesy of Liongate Studios / IMDb
It’s these scenes that confirm Egerton as one of the finest actors of his generation, and Heger as a young and emerging thespian with a blinding future ahead of her. They ground the film when it threatens to veer off the road in its more plot-heavy moments and they even out the crackling electricity of the rest of the film. They are the final ingredients to a recipe for one of this year’s hidden gems in the realm of indie cinema.
Watching this small but mighty film in the literal midst of the clamor for the new Demon Slayer film (now also showing in theaters, if you want to check that out), I didn’t feel left out one bit. I felt gratified being tucked in a pocket of current cinema anchored not by blockbuster spectacle, but by the always reliable tool that is a deeply human story.
She Rides Shotgun is still showing in Philippine cinemas.
