Standing in line for the screening last night at the 2026 Berlinale, I told a friend that The Weight seemed like precisely my jam: a 1930s survival thriller set in the dense forests of the Oregon wilderness, starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe. I’m pleased to report my gut was right, and this feature debut from Padraic McKinley, seemingly influenced by the likes of William Friedkin’s Sorceror, is a solid throwback.
Hawke plays Murphy, a widowed father and jack-of-all-trades — a description that applies equally well to the actor himself, who has spent the latter stage of his career accepting wildly varied roles and excelling in nearly all of them. Here, Murphy is a Depression-era mechanic (presumably) whose run-in with plainclothes officers lands him in a labor camp, his young daughter Penny (Avy Berry) scheduled to be absorbed into the foster care system before he serves out his sentence. Crowe is Clancy, the warden who offers Murphy a shortcut: transport half a ton of stolen gold bars across miles of mostly uncharted Oregon forest before the federal government arrives to confiscate them. The crew Murphy assembles — loudmouth racist Rankin (Austin Amelio), self-proclaimed socialist Singh (Avi Nash), soft-spoken farmer’s son Olsen (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), plus a pair of armed guards with unclear loyalties — all but guarantees the journey won’t be a smooth one.
To his slight detriment, Murphy happens to be good at everything, including engineering, marksmanship, leadership under pressure, crisis management. The screenplay doesn’t bother explaining how Murphy became this particular brand of Renaissance man, and I’ll admit I kept waiting for the film to complicate him in ways it never does. That said, Hawke is so fully committed to the role’s physical demands that you can more or less forgive the character’s superhero tendencies and just go along for the ride.
The diversity of the group feels a touch engineered, and a subplot about Singh’s racial classification under U.S. law seems to exist primarily to give Amelio’s racist somewhere to aim. Julia Jones fares better as Anna, an indigenous woman who attaches herself to the expedition; her character’s backstory is gestured at rather than truly explored, but Jones makes the most of an underwritten role, particularly during a harrowing river crossing and a violent confrontation near the end of the journey.
What carries The Weight across the finish line is the accumulation of genuine dread that McKinley generates not just from the circumstances, but from the terrain itself: mist-covered treetops and rickety bridges give the sense that the wilderness is just as likely to kill this group as any of the human threats (and don’t worry, there are several of those, too). The Sorcerer comparisons are inevitable: sure, the convicts are transporting gold bars instead of dynamite-laden trucks, and we’re in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest instead of the South American jungle, but there’s clearly a lot of shared DNA. Influences notwithstanding, McKinley’s film manages to carve out a solid enough identity of its own, thanks in no small part to Hawke’s magnetic lead performance.
The Weight held its European premiere as part of the 76th annual Berlinale.