Tow Review
Tow (2025) Film Review from the 24th Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by Stephanie Laing, written by Jonathan Keasey, and starring Rose Byrne, Dominic Sessa, Demi Lovato, Ariana DeBose, Octavia Spencer, and Simon Rex.
Director Stephanie Laing delivers a movie that strays so close to cliche sentimentality, but manages to reign it in at the last second, staying on message. That message is very simple: when you’re living out of your car and desperate for work, losing that car is an apocalyptic, life-ending experience.
Rose Byrne plays Amanda Ogle, a sunglasses-wearing homeless lady, desperate to get her life back in order after dropping out of vet school with far too much debt for her to stress about paying back. Her estranged daughter, Avery, keeps in touch with her through strained phone conversations, believing her mother to be in a better situation than she is, as Amanda attempts to protect her daughter from her seemingly hopeless situation by lying about where she’s living and working. The slight ray of light in Amanda’s life, that of a possible new job transporting dogs to a small pet store to get their pictures taken, is shattered when the ’91 Toyota Camry she’s living out of and desperately needs to keep that job is stolen.
When it turns up in a local tow yard, all seems well, until Amanda finds herself faced with a routine fine in excess of $200, a princely, unattainable sum for someone barely surviving on the streets. Though the man at the counter, Cliff (Simon Rex), is sympathetic to her plight, there’s nothing he can do, driving the hopeless Amanda to attempt to sue the towing company in hopes of getting her car back in time to keep her job. The makings of a boiler-plate feel-good movie about the resilience of the human spirit, possibly with the hunky guy at the towing company thrown in as a consolation prize for Amanda’s troubles.
Except this movie sidesteps all that Hollywood make-believe dross and drivel in order to explore the realities of homelessness, even if it is a little clean. Charging her phone at coffee shops (until she’s asked to leave), sleeping in public parks (until other homeless people attempt to extort her for sex/money/both), and the horrors of the legal system, which won’t even help her at first when she can’t provide a legal address. “People like you” is a phrase that haunts Amanda as her life and sanity deteriorates, and she chafes against her limitations; the shelter she finds herself in is run out of a church, and maintained by a hardass named Barb, played by the one and only Octavia Spencer, and, most devastating, a simple court order to have her car given back to her is thwarted when she finds out, to her horror, that the towing company has sold her car.
“People like you,” Cliff tells her with a smile he hopes is kindly, “Don’t always come back.”
Amanda’s struggle is more humanistic and tragic than most movies of this genre tend to be, and perhaps that is a consequence of the times we live in. Art is a reflection of the world in which it’s made, after all, and, as the movie informs us at the outset, 1-3 million people live out of their cars. I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention Dominic Sessa, the other star of this movie, Amanda’s idealistic, bike-riding young lawyer, Kevin, who takes it upon himself to fight the corporation that owns not just the towing company, but also the used car company that bought her car.
I wouldn’t call this movie heart-warming. There are hints of a more by-the-numbers sort of movie that Tow’s screenplay wisely skirts, like a juggler throwing his balls aside in favor of more difficult fare, and perhaps that is this movie’s strongest asset. By teasing its audience with a more traditional structure, Tow’s payoffs and resolution are more memorable and relatable than they would be otherwise. Homelessness is no fantasy, after all, it’s a very real issue, and Amanda isn’t afraid to fall apart and contemplate ending it all, no matter how much she feels she’s emulating Elle Woods from Legally Blonde (2001).
Rating: 7/10
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