Lionsgate hasn’t given much of a marketing push to Nick Rowland’s wiry, tense new crime thriller, She Rides Shotgun, which seems like an all-too-common fate nowadays for movies that aren’t big franchise plays or feature huge stars or fit neatly into popular genres. Perhaps inconveniently for the studio, the film is excellent and deserves way more attention. It showcases two astonishing performances: one from the always reliable Taron Egerton as the hardened, haunted ex-con Nate McClusky and another from newcomer Ana Sophia Heger as his young daughter, Polly, in whose queasy glances the drama finds its sorrow and its depth.
The picture begins with Nate hurriedly picking up Polly from school one day. He has just been freed from prison, but this isn’t some long-hoped-for reunion: The car he’s driving has a shattered window, and Polly is wary of this impatient, anxious man whom she barely remembers. The girl doesn’t know yet that her mom has just been killed by white supremacists who are on the hunt for Nate. As father and daughter drive off together, director Rowland keeps them isolated in their individual frames, as if each were a ghost hovering on the other’s margins. The effect keeps us on our toes; we really don’t know where this thing is headed.
That jumpy, unpredictable quality runs throughout the film as father and daughter flee from one shelter to another, their journey gathering urgency and menace with each new interaction. The horizon is ever-present, either as a forbidding blankness or a flat, shimmering cityscape that reinforces the characters’ growing isolation. The police pursue Nate, though they seem to know he didn’t kill Polly’s mom. The neo-Nazi prison gang chasing him is part of a mysterious massive meth operation called Slabtown in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert; the members appear to have infiltrated everything, including law enforcement. Nate wants to keep Polly safe, but that also means introducing her to the darker side of his world, teaching her how to defend herself and enlisting her aid in a convenience-store holdup. She sees him burn a man’s face half off. She ducks under the car seats as he finds himself in the middle of a shoot-out. She helps him nurse his wounds. She sits in horror as they wind up in a gnarly car chase. Along the way, she learns to distrust everybody completely.
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Equal parts violent and intimate, the picture keeps the viewer in a constant state of agitation as Rowland’s cinematic strategy gradually shifts in subtle ways. Eventually, Nate and Polly get to occupy the same frame, a visual reinforcement of their growing bond. It’s as if these ghosts have finally become people — but only for a brief while. Each lurks in the background of the other’s shot, often out of focus, as though we’re watching someone become another’s memory in real time.
She Rides Shotgun is based on a very good 2017 novel by Jordan Harper, though it takes liberties with the story. (Harper co-wrote the script and clearly seems fine with the changes.) The central premise, of an ex-con father and his innocent daughter on the run from pretty much everybody, has remained intact, however, and it comes to vibrant life with Egerton and Heger’s performances. Egerton has done his share of action, but he has never felt this raw or dangerous; it’s hard to believe this guy was playing Elton John just a few years ago. Heger, meanwhile, is a true discovery. Her upturned, interrupted eyebrows can shift from pleading to suspicious in a split second, and she embraces each transformation of her character with the full force of her being. Child actors rarely go this big this convincingly. But it’s a perfect match: The whole story turns on how this scared young girl becomes a tough, tragic redeemer through this wild, unlikely journey. Her fear, her joy, her rage, and, finally, her anguish make She Rides Shotgun unforgettable.
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