MOLLY BELLE WRIGHT, WYATT SOLIS, JOHN MAGARO IN OMAHA

TRAILER

American poverty and the pain of the unexpressed

In the opening of the subtly painful and beautifully filmed and acted 2025 debut film Omaha, the house of a dad (John Magaro, of First Cow and Past Lives, in his most emotionally powerful role to date) is being foreclosed on, forcing him and his children to vacate immediately, early one morning, on a road trip. The dad, reeling from financial ruin and the death of his wife, must hurriedly force his children to pack up and leave amid intense emotional distress. He tells his young daughter to imagine the house is on fire, and grab only what she would grab in that case. A sheriff stands outside. The following road trip is a kind of slow burn mystery.

The daughter is nine-year-old Ella (an excellent Molly Belle Wright), the son six-year-old Charlie (Wyatt Solis, also fine), and both come to vivid life in what will be a confusing road trip a little like no other, from poverty toward desperation. At departure, Charlie is stuffed in back and Ella runs along the broken-down hatchback's passenger side pushing, while Dad pushes on the driver's side to jump-start it, obviously a routine they've gone through before. In back Charlie hugs their Golden Retriever, Rex. For Charlie, this is an adventure; Ella knows it's trouble.

Though this film has been accused of being miserabilism and perhaps poverty porn, its misery and its poverty are masked by John Magaro's tight-lipped protagonist, who never says what is wrong or where they are going. This film is almost dangerously withholding; but you can watch it as a mystery story, one that stays close to the children's point of view. Part of that mystery, actually is solved right away for us. It's 2008, the father is in construction, out of work, and his food stamps are running out, as is his ability to cope. But he doesn't tell any of this to the kids, though it is on his face and Ella can read it and sometimes plays back his desperation to him on her own face.

A woman at the end tells this father "they seem like good kids." They do. Ella can be a child, and dance and play; but she's had grownup responsibility and awareness forced upon her and that shows in the way she looks at her dad sometimes. Charlie questions what is happening, and he can be frightened and horrified, but mostly he's a tousled haired boy ready to play. And they do both get to play, gamboling joyfully through a zoo, and swimming in a motel pool. But their father is imploding and the three of them are on a terrible cross country highway trip, through Salt Lake, to Omaha, a destination whose nature is kept secret for a reason.

This more stand-alone role for Magaro, often wordless, is nonetheless layered and rich, proof that he ranks among the best film actors of his generation. Magaro and Wright here have been compared to Mescal and Corio in Aftersun.. This is a painful movie to watch, with the peculiar, gnawing pain of a father whose poverty inhibits his relationship with his children, his inability to provide rapidly gnawing away at his parenthood. Every moment by the roadside costs him money and is a gift and a deprivation. He doesn't eat: he feeds the kids. He plays sometimes by their rules: he does what he can to please them, to let them live as children. (Charlie steals toy cars at the gas stations: his father never mentions it.) Dad uses a swear word, and Charlie says as punishment he has to give them ice cream: he quietly announces that at the next stop they will get it. In Omaha Ella has learned at a rest stop there is a good zoo. Dad takes them there, pays thirty dollars for their admissions, when at the grocery store he had barely twenty dollars worth of food stamps, a good time being more important now than nourishment.

Writing in the Guardian at Sundance, Adrien Gordon called Omaha "withholding to the point of numbness," and the dad's tightlippedness is indeed painful. But Horton goes on to list compensations: "the hypnotic quality of Webley’s visual style," the "fleeting gorgeous moments" of sunrise and sunset "at speed," the "quiet bits of unity and looseness amid crisis." These he thinks (and I agree), "linger after the film's somewhat flat finale." Omaha in fact packs a powerful emotional wallop, both along the road trip and in that finale, which is still devastating, however "flat" in its delivery. Omaha is a very promising debut, beautifully filmed and edited and acted. Cole Webley is a new filmmaker to watch.

Omaha, 83 mins., premiered Jan. 2025 at Sundance, showing also at Miami, Dallas, Nantucket, Munich, Maine, Melbourne, Busan, Stockholm, São Paulo, and many other US and international festivals. Opening in the US Apr. 24, 2026, in France Apr. 29. Metacritic rating: 76%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.