SUNDANCE: ‘The Weight’ Is Deliciously Stylish

Everyone has their own preconceived notions about the types of films that premiere at Sundance: high-emotional-intensity dramas, maybe coming-of-age stories, perhaps even the odd indie horror. The Weight, at first glance, appears to slot tidily into the reflective period piece category that Train Dreams occupied in the 2025 edition of the festival. That impression couldn’t be more incorrect, as The Weight, despite its Great Depression-era setting, is a thoroughly modern affair.

Directed by Padraic McKinley in his directorial debut, The Weight is a blisteringly confident trek through Oregon, where each flirtation with death feels closer than the last, and each cinematic flourish outdoes the last. Is it style over substance? Absolutely, but when the style rocks this hard, you’ve got no choice but to go along with the ride.

Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) is an Oregon outlaw in the 1930s trying to provide the best life for his daughter Penny (Avy Berry). His transgressions catch up with him, and he’s thrown into a work camp headed up by Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe), who notices Murphy’s wherewithal and desperation, so he offers him a job to get time off his sentence.

You see, Franklin D. Roosevelt is about to seize gold from across the country and return it to the treasury. The owners of the mines do not want that to happen. Therefore, Clancy hires Murphy and a band of his fellow prisoners to smuggle the gold from a local mine to a drop location out of FDR’s purview. 

Ethan Hawke once again captures the audience hook, line, and sinker.

The sizzling energy of The Weight is felt all the way in the beginning of the film’s by-the-seat-of-your-pants prologue. Ethan Hawke is the perfect actor to smooth the transition from his rough-and-tumble outlaw lifestyle to the regimented ways of the work camp, carrying his steely determination across both settings.

For a man (or men, plus a woman) on a mission project like The Weight to work, you need to be able to sell a cool protagonist. In a single moment, where the prisoners are trying to move a boulder and Murphy steps in and fixes the issue in a few minutes flat, complete with the face-melting swell of the score by Shelby Gaines, Hawke has the audience hook, line, and sinker. 

From that moment onwards, The Weight just moves. After a sequence at the mines that feels like a mission briefing from a video game, we’re off to the races, introduced to our main crew of prisoners who will be assisting Sam. This crew is the weakest part of the film. With too many members, some blend into the background. The ones that do make an impression, however.

Julia Jones as Anna, an Indigenous runaway, provides a new energy to the crew. You’ve got to love the outspoken socialist Singh (Avi Nash) as well. Really, though, Hit Man‘s Austin Amelio as the wisecracking Rankin absolutely runs away with the movie, his motormouth antics becoming wildly endearing by the time the credits roll. 

The Weight maintains a visceral tension throughout.

Once the crew is established, the perfunctory table-setting by screenwriters Shelby Gaines, Matthew Chapman, and Matthew Booi gives way to Padraic McKinley’s direction, and The Weight is allowed to do what it really does best. Complete with titles that explain how many days remain in their journey, The Weight’s smuggling operation never, for a moment, feels safe. Matteo Cocco‘s cinematography makes the Oregon mountains and forests look as cool as they are treacherous, keeping a solid layer of cool aesthetic grime throughout. 

Moreover, McKinley’s direction nails the visceral, exciting nature this sort of story needs. There are double crosses, changes of plan, and, most important of all, all manner of nerve-shredding scenarios our protagonists have to ignore. It’d be easy to say that a sequence in which gold bricks are thrown across a bridge, with Hawke as the intermediary, is the most stressful in the film and one of the most stressful of the year. And then, McKinley follows it up with at least three sequences just as good!

The way The Weight keeps compounding its own wild scenarios on top of each other would be impressive in its own right, yet it has the follow-through to stick the landing and send the audience out practically doing backflips. Yes, The Weight lacks a bit of depth in its character development. Nevertheless, The Weight makes up for any inadequacy with a positively engrossing style that prioritizes making the audience feel involved. If this is what Padraic McKinley’s all about, sign me up for more.

The Weight premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. The film is still awaiting distribution.