Review: ‘Desperation Road’ walks a dark path, but the Southern noir thriller never forgets there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel

Actress and filmmaker Nadine Crocker’s feature-length debut Continue was a hard-hitting, intensely personal story based on her own experiences that she wrote, directed, produced, and played the lead role. Proving that there are more strings yet to her bow, Desperation Road proves her to be a dab hand at adapting pre-existing source material for the screen.

Author Michael Farris Smith wrote the screenplay for the adaptation of his slow-burning southern-fried thriller, and while it’s dark from beginning to end in the broadest sense, Crocker and a cast firing on all cylinders ensure that there’s always a sliver of light shining through even as the people caught up in a small town maelstrom of spiraling circumstances come perilously close to circling the drain.

Opening with a harrowing scene that lays its cards on the table that Crocker has no intention of making Desperation Road an easy or remotely comfortable watch, Willa Fitzgerald’s Maben is arrested and assaulted by a police officer, plunging audiences into the realization that this is going to be a no-holds-barred story that doesn’t shy away from the unforgiving and outright despicable scenarios the erstwhile protagonist has been placed into, although a minor form of salvation is at least found through an inciting incident that sets the rest of the narrative in motion.

Now on the run with young daughter Annalee (Pyper Braun), Maben soon finds herself crossing paths with Garrett Hedlund’s Russell Gaines, freshly released from prison and eying a chance at piecing together the crumbling remnants of whatever life he had before it was taken away. Of course, forming a surrogate family with a fugitive mother/daughter duo wasn’t what he had in mind, although the unexpected family unit is soon expanded when they seek refuge with Russell’s father Mitchell, bringing all the grizzled gravitas you’d expect from Mel Gibson in a supporting role.

With law enforcement, local hoodlums, and an overarching fate that intertwines all of the key figures together, it’s easy to brand Desperation Road as a crime thriller, especially when the poster features Hedlund and Gibson brandishing firearms. That would be doing it a huge disservice, though, with complex and complicated dynamics between virtually every person with a speaking part creating a throughline that underpins every action – and subsequent reaction – as having a greater meaning.

That’s never truer than a huge reveal midway through that comes like a bolt out of the blue to those who haven’t read the book, one that Crocker smartly avoids foreshadowing and signposting until it becomes integral to the plot, which then recontextualizes everything that came before in the space of a single scene. It could have easily come off as a cynical rug-pull or storytelling sleight-of-hand dropped in for the sake of attempting to generate shocked reactions, but it both feels entirely organic to everything that’s come before while painting what’s to follow in the third act in a brand new light.

Part Southern Gothic and part neo-Western with dashes of noir, bursts of violence, and a relentless undertone of grief, anguish, and regret, Desperation Road is always spinning at least a handful to its plates. To its credit, though, as often as one or two of them may begin to wobble, none of them come crashing down and shatter.

The tonal balance isn’t an easy one to pull off, and filmmakers vastly more experienced than Crocker have tried and failed, so praise is due to the key creatives for taking something that sounds familiar and perhaps even formulaic on paper, but repainting it as an engaging, emotionally-driven genre film that both is and isn’t what you think it’ll turn out to be.