The Weight Review: Ethan Hawke Period Thriller Has Moments Of Tense Brilliance

The Weight is a well-crafted and well-acted period thriller that generates a high level of dramatic tension, even if it can't totally sustain it.

Published Sep 18, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT

Alex is the Senior Editor of Reviews & Prestige Content, overseeing ScreenRant's film reviews as one of its Rotten Tomatoes-approved critics. After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in English, he spent a locked-down year in Scotland completing a Master's in Film Studies from the University of Edinburgh, which he hears is a nice, lively city. He now lives in and works from Milan, Italy, conveniently a short train ride from the Venice Film Festival, which he first covered for SR in 2024.

It's perhaps an unusual compliment, but The Weight has one of the most emotionally impactful title cards I've ever seen. It comes after a prologue of sorts immerses us in the predicament of Ethan Hawke's protagonist, whose steady slide into the Great Depression has been suddenly speeding up. He and his young daughter lose their home, and in their search for a new one, they are accosted by a group of men. Those men turn out to be cops, and slugging them before they flashed their badges becomes a costly mistake.

Director Padraic McKinley chooses to drop the title card the moment just after it's dawned on the girl that she's to be separated from her father, for who knows how long. The camera holds on Hawke's face as she's taken crying out of the jail, as it hits him just how profoundly he's failed her. "Hits" is too forceful a word, though – what we see, as the movie then tells us, is "the weight" forming in real time and settling on his chest, sinking him all the way to rock bottom. The cut from this moment to the title card, usually (if anything) a brief release, has a suffocating finality to it.

Not all of The Weight is quite as good as this beginning; once the story proper gets going, the script settles into a rhythm that dulls some of its ability to cut right through to our nervous system. But there are more than enough moments of visceral filmmaking to make this wonderfully atmospheric period thriller an engaging watch. If anything, it's a testament to what McKinley can do that I would rather watch these characters have a tense conversation than actually try to kill each other.

The Weight Is An Exceptionally Tense At Its Best, And Still Good Fun When It Dips

Samuel Murphy (Hawke), a widower, WWI veteran, and out-of-work mechanic in 1933 Oregon, doesn't deserve to have fallen on such hard times. He's beyond determined to work his way out – he's transferred to a labor camp breaking down rock to build a road, where each day knocks time off his sentence – but he's already all but doomed. In a month, his little Penny (Avy Berry) will go from living in government care to officially being a warden of the state, and therefore up for adoption. There's nothing he can do to get himself set free so soon.

That is, until Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) intervenes. He's seen what Murphy can do, and when he learns his story, he realizes he's found the person he's looking for. The Warden has a friend at a gold mine deeper in the wilderness, which, by order of FDR, is due to be nationalized. This friend doesn't want all that gold confiscated. Murphy, along with three men of his choosing, needs to carry packs of gold bars to a drop point five days' hike away. Do so, and Clancy will personally sign them all into freedom. But if even a single bar doesn't make the trip, all is lost.

McKinley's textured filmmaking has a way of driving home how one wrong step out here can have life-or-death consequences.

It's a strong setup, made significantly more compelling by the patient way The Weight has brought us there. Hawke's performance of Murphy's desperation sits somewhere between hardened determination and animalistic panic, and the film leaves no doubt that if this were a solo job, he would get it done. So, like him, we become hyper-aware of everything that could get in his way. First and foremost, his chosen fellow prisoners: Singh (Avi Nash), who seems kind but too smart for his own good; Olson (Lucas Lynggaad Tonnesen), who has the opposite problem; and Rankin (Austin Amelio), who is both braggadocious and combative, but was the best fourth Murphy could find on short notice.

Two armed men, played by Sam Hazeldine and George Burgess, travel with them to protect their bosses' interests. Neither are very friendly. And, unexpectedly, they're joined by Anna (Julia Jones), a Native American woman who uses this group sneaking off as her own opportunity to run away from the mine. Their journey is strenuous, and the terrain is sometimes perilous; McKinley's textured filmmaking has a way of driving home how one wrong step out here can have life-or-death consequences. But it's clear the real danger is whether someone in this group, willfully or carelessly, ruins Murphy's chances of getting home.

The Weight has greater success with carelessness. A standout sequence has the group reach a rickety, crumbling rope bridge across a canyon that simply can't hold a man with a full pack of gold, and the way they choose to get their payload across kept my heart in my throat for several minutes. Hawke is great at holding the screen in moments like these, but they also show the value of casting Amelio, who brilliantly plays Rankin as the one member of this crew who could believably derail this enterprise by accident or by choice.

As the third act approaches, however, the endgame of this job reveals itself, and the film grows more openly violent. There's nothing wrong with these scenes, per se, but they're a touch more conventional. They don't exactly play into the emotional promise of the more grounded opening, even with Hawke there to string it all together. That said, no one should worry they'll be let down by the ending – how The Weight chooses to finish this story, especially given where it started, is thoroughly entertaining.

The Weight releases in theaters on Friday, September 18.