WILL POIULTER IN UNION COUNTY
TRAILER
Will Poulter enlivens a quiet, touching drug docudrama about success at recovery
Poulter, a young English actor, blends seamlessly into this drab American docudrama full - though some think not full enough - of real people in the world of the Ohio opioid epidemic. He plays Cody Parsons, an inarticulate young addict making his way through the system that will in his case lead him to sobriety and help him stay there. An alternative to prison time, it is a county-mandated drug court (also referred to as an adult recovery court) that supervises recovery. Lasting successes, especially among the young, are hard to stick with drug addiction. This film hinges on something positive: "the Ohio drug courts that help to rehabilitate addicts through a system of non-judgmental support and a strict, yet not unforgiving, schedule," as Benjamin Lee in his Guardian Sundance review describes it.
Not much happens, and not much is said. The main thing is being there, and the bluntly titled Union County takes you there. The system in this case seems gentle, in places. Cody has a car accident alongside his foster-brother Jack (Noah Centineo - who's been compared by Benjamin Lee to "a young Mark Ruffalo circa You Can Count on Me" - in a car where he accelerates after shooting up - an incident I don't recall seeing before. This leads to rehab, and a relapse leads to residence in a program. There he attends meetings and is befriended by a women's peer support person across the street, Anna (Elise Kibler).
More memorable than the inarticulate Cody are a handful of authentic roles, a judge, a rehab person, and the recovering addict who speaks memorably about how living without drugs has enabled her to experience the whole complex range of human emotions, such as jealousy, where the drug life offered nothing much between ecstasy or despair.
Again, the point is not so much to provide striking incidents, though another, more entertaining but less realistic film might have had more of those, but to take us to the drug life and the drug environment. The point is that through the generosity of the Sackler brothers, whose name has been taken off a lot of galleries, wings, and endowments of museums they used to whitewash an immense wealth acquired through sale of super-addictive opioids to uninformed or irresponsible doctors in vulnerable communities, places like the part of Ohio depicted here have been plagued by widespread addiction to "prescription" drugs. So here we see ordinary people in Union County, Ohio. As an article from ABC about this film says, it was shot "across local streets and homes, and inside a real working drug court, aiming to capture an authentic look at the rural opioid epidemic and adult-recovery programs [in Union and adjacent counties of Ohio]." Opioids have made drug addiction more real and everyday, more widespread and ordinary, in many parts of America.
Not all parts equally. The opioid epidemic has been worst in Appalachia and the Rust Belt: States like West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio (shown here); in some states of the South, especially Arkansas, Alabama , Mississippi, and Louisiana; and in New England and the Mid-Atlantic: States like Delaware, Maryland, and Maine.
Will Poulter is continuing a theme of drug related roles. He played Billy Cutler in the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick[/I], an OxyContin sales representative. In the 2013 comedy "We're the Millers" he played a naive neighbor recruited by main character Jason Sudeikis to help smuggle marijuana. Now he's a victim.
Poulter's ability to appear authentic is underused in Union County because he's so monosyllabic. He does appear something of a lunkhead. It's surprising when he gathers up his possessions to move from his car to a room assigned in a halfway house that he appears to possess a book and a notebook. But his seamless entry into the role stays in the mind.
When Cole Groth in his Sundance review for FandomWire describes Union County as just another in a long line of drug addiction movies whose authenticity can't save a "tired genre," he is missing something essential. This is something of a milestone because it is a positive film about addiction, and its focus is to show us rehabilitation and the very specific way in which it is brought about. Cody is initially helped by getting a shot in the butt of Vivitrol, a prolonged-release drug to prevent him from enjoying opioids for a while. But Cody does the hard work on his own to get to the next stage in the program. That gets harder when he suffers a terrible, unexpected loss. We know, especially we who have experienced recovery ourselves, that in the early stages a severe emotional setback can put a terrible dent in our self-confidence and threaten to send us back to square one, which at that stage or any stage is just one shot, one drink, one joint away. But (spoiler alert) Cody makes it past that. He weathers his Dark Night of the Soul every recovering addict goes through, sitting in his rehabilitated car by himself on the edge of a cornfield. It's a good metaphor for the struggle. And he wins. As one can.
Union County 97 mins., premiered at Sundance Jan. 25, 2026, showing at half a dozen other domestic festivals. Distributed by Oscilloscope, it opens in US theaters Aug. 14, 2026. Metacritic rating: 73%.