For reasons we might be able to discern, there have been a handful of movies recently that have clearly taken inspiration from William Friedkin’s 1977 thriller Sorcerer, and to a lesser extent from that movie’s predecessor, The Wages of Fear. In those films, four men are hired to transport trucks full of nitroglycerin through the Central American jungle, where one wrong move can result in certain, explosive death. The new movie The Weight borrows from this by sending four men on foot through the forests of the Pacific Northwest as they carry backpacks full of gold, and you probably don’t need me to tell you that a lot of other people want that gold, too.
The movie takes place during the Great Depression, with Ethan Hawke playing our hero, Murphy, a man who’s been sentenced to hard labor for beating up some guys he didn’t know were cops. All Murphy wants to do is to get back to his daughter, and so when he’s given the opportunity to be released from his sentence by transporting this gold for a local mining company, Murphy decides to take the chance along with three other convicts. But woe betide the men if they lose even one bar of gold, as their employers have made it clear they’ll pay with their lives.
The movie certainly calls back stylistically to Friedkin’s film, and not just because our men are faced with a horrifyingly rickety bridge that, in this case, will undoubtedly collapse under the weight of the gold. The movie’s grinding, sometimes abstract score reminds us of the synth-heavy music Tangerine Dream provided for Sorcerer, and the rain in the forest is close enough to, well, a rainforest that we can almost imagine the two movies happening in the same place.
It would be hard to screw up the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and this movie certainly doesn’t do that, but I will say that if I see any more vignetting in the corners of picture frames then I might swear off movie-watching until this unfortunate visual fad has run its course. This film is undeniably tense, but it’s also surprisingly brisk, and not allowing us to really sink into the dread sometimes keeps it from feeling truly ominous, other than one especially harrowing scene that’s lit only by the lightning from a thunderstorm.
There’s no question our contemporary time is precarious, as if we’re all teetering right on the edge of an apocalyptic drop. And as even our historical movies often reflect our current circumstances, The Weight understands the enormous consequences of one… tiny… slip.
The Weight is in theaters.
