The Deputy Review: This Southern Crime Noir's Reach Exceeds Its Grasp

The Deputy benefits from a solid script and good performances, but never really escapes its genre trappings to become something special.

Published Sep 23, 2026, 7:54 AM EDT

Brandon Zachary is a Lead Writer for Screen Rant's New Movie Team. He also writes or has written for Comicbook.com, CBR, That Hashtag Show, Just Watch, and TVBrittanyF. Brandon is an Emerging Screenwriters Semi-Finalist, co-writer of a Screencraft Quarter-Finalist, a seasoned on-screen interviewer, and a MASSIVE nerd. You can reach him at bs.zachary@gmail.com

The noir genre has gone through plenty of permutations over the years. Its trappings, whether that be the put-upon detective, the criminal conspiracy, or the twisty games of cat and mouse, can be easily tweaked and applied to different settings for good effect. High schools like in Brick, sci-fi landscapes like in Blade Runner, and even animal metropolises like in Zootopia make the genre sing.

Another example of that kind of tonal fusion comes into play with The Deputy, a mystery that plays out over the course of a single night in a rural town. There's a hangdog protagonist who alternates between frustrating and admirable, overwhelmed by the circumstances surrounding him, even as he does his best to respond as best he can.

The film has moments of intrigue and a genuinely compelling core, but the narrative can't really wring greater thematic weight out of the premise. The supporting turns and central mystery are enough to keep the audience engaged, even if (like its dopey main character) The Deputy never quite reaches its full potential.

The Deputy Is A Deep-Fried Southern Noir

Based on the book of the same name by Victor Gischler, The Deputy follows Toby (Duke Nicholson), a slacker in a small Oklahoma town who has found work as the part-time deputy for the local Sheriff's office. Tasked by his mentor Sheriff Krueger (William H. Macy) with watching over a recently discovered body, a bored Toby wanders off for a hook-up, only to return and discover the body has been taken.

What follows is a winding mystery in which he has to contend with human traffickers, dirty cops, and a pair of vengeful locals who blame him for the first death. Nicholson does a good job of playing the somewhat disconnected Toby, who feels like he's sleepwalking through life with a mix of apathy and frustration at the world around him.

Disappointing to his wife, boss, and co-workers, Toby is a great little riff on the noir hero: a put-upon investigator who has to prove his mettle to himself just as much as he needs to prove it to others. While the script never really gives him the sort of fully fleshed-out growth that justifies his overall arc, Nicholson turns the character's confusion at his situation into both comedy and drama.

The film benefits from a well-rounded supporting cast who elevate the material. While the side characters may be more standard noir tropes than distinct characters, the likes of William H. Macy, Tiffany Haddish, Stephen Dorf, and Billie Lourd deliver memorable turns that thread the needle between comedy and tension admirably to play into the film's back-and-forth tenor.

The Deputy Is A Solid Mystery, But A So-So Movie

Directed by Matt Sukkar, The Deputy has a bluntness that works in its favor most of the time. It's not a showy film, but it's not really supposed to be; the muted visual palette reinforces the dour nature of a small town in Middle America. There's a pervading bleakness to the surroundings that doesn't bleed into the characters, but motivates them in an interesting tonal way.

The biggest problem with the movie is the relative surface-level quality of the narrative and characters. While the central mystery is compelling, it also leaves enough lingering threads and unresolved character arcs to feel frustrating on some level. Characters who introduce themselves as interesting wrinkles are quickly dealt with or removed from the plot.

...the movie feels like a wasted opportunity.

No one gets a real arc to speak of outside of Toby, and even his development is reduced to very big bursts of momentum that hint at something more compelling, but never quite achieve it. In theory, his growth into his own man should be richly compelling, but it never really elicits much tension. The character is passive by design, but he lacks a real sense of agency as a result.

Instead, Toby feels like someone who just has stuff happen to him and who responds in kind, not because of how the events have shaped him, but because of what the movie needs to happen next. The Deputy isn't bad, and it's far from disappointing as a noir. The cast do a lot of work to make the Southern riffs on their archetypes stand out in funny ways.

Still, the movie feels like a wasted opportunity. Much like Toby, there's a sense of potential to the narrative that never comes to fruition. While fans of the larger noir genre will probably enjoy the film, there's not much reason to revisit The Deputy once the credits roll and the mystery is solved.

The Deputy releases in theaters and on digital on Friday, September 25.

The Deputy

5/10