Tow (2026 | US | 106 minutes | Stephanie Laing)
Amanda Ogle (Rose Byrne) is more like the average American that we want to admit. She has been living out of her car in the painfully expensive city of Seattle for more than six months and just as she finds a job that could pull her out of the mire, someone steals her car. After a little joy ride it’s ditched and towed. If any of you have experienced this, you know that not only do you have a ticket from the city to pay for but an extra salt in the would fee for “storage” at the lot by the private towing company. Even though it wasn’t her doing, the bill was up to her to handle. When you barely have the funds to feed yourself, this fee is untenable. While looking for a place to lay her head and hoping against hope she’ll have transport by the time her new job starts, she goes to the city to right this wrong and get her damn car back. As you can imagine, it wouldn’t be much of a movie if she was successful on the first try. It’s a story of finding hope in a desperate moment and perseverance when someone is trying to beat you down.
I did enjoy the film and being based on a true story gave me pangs in my heart the entire time. Knowing that the legal team for a company would purposely and maliciously go out of their way to make someone suffer (especially someone who is already dealing with enough) is almost too overwhelming to watch much less experience. The fact that she had a teenaged kid in another city that was unreachable without the missing car was broken glass on a poop sundae.
That being said, Tow was a Disney-fied version of reality. It glossed over a lot of the deep trauma and issues that folks like Amanda suffer on the daily even without someone much richer and more privileged making it ten times worse. We find out at one point that she suffers from addiction, had been dry for a while, but with all that was going on fell down again, but it’s almost treated like a moment of dark humor so that the film could remain light and digestible. I get that the times we live in are absolute garbage if you aren’t loaded or have dark skin, but don’t sugarcoat a story that reveals the truth of our times. It’s one thing if you’re trying to keep the film moving along and not lose the audience, it’s another to make light of their lived experience.
Telling this story is important just to know that we should still eat the rich. I appreciated the end where we were quickly introduced to the protagonist’s real life counterpart, her teen and the lawyer who dedicated himself to helping her. It gave the experiences we had just witnessed a bit more heft and an extra heavy moment for Seattleites seeing them sitting on the bench at the pinnacle of Gasworks Park. Worth seeing, but maybe not in the theater.
Tow is in theaters starting this weekend 3/20