Lou (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

What? This movie must have been carelessly dropped on Netflix sometime recently, and I just won't forgive them for that. I shouldn't have to do the "bored scroll" through what the streaming giant thinks I might like in order to stumble across an action thriller starring Allison freaking Janney. It's called Lou, and that tells you nothing. The blurb is vague. The poster or image is vague and just sort of bad. But the movie is fabulous, and I earnestly hope that hearing that is enough to persuade you, dear reader, to go watch it.

Janney plays the titular character, a recluse and survivalist-type isolationist in the rural Pacific Northwest. It's 1986 and a massive seasonal storm is about to blast Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington, where Lou is not doing well. Sure, she capably kills a deer in the opening sequence, proving her mettle to us if no one else. But she also withdraws her savings from the bank, drinks straight bourbon, and writes a letter to someone about inheriting her property before preparing her rifle for suicide. Just then, a distant neighbor named Hannah (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) pounds on her door. Hannah's daughter Vee is missing, and she's pretty sure she was taken. The storm has just hit the island. As the sheets of rain cascade down, Hannah catches Lou up to speed on her situation, hoping Lou can help her as the only other person for miles, probably.

Vee was taken by Phillip, Hannah's ex-husband, who was a special forces soldier and abusive husband who faked his own death so he could sneak in and abduct his daughter. Phillip's (Logan Marshall-Green) sociopathy notwithstanding, he's a talented survivalist in his own right, and he has some backup nearby in the form of a couple mercenary-like friends. He aims to spirit Vee away and take revenge on his ex-wife after terrorizing her for a while. Of course, none of them counted on Hannah asking Lou for help; Lou is a sort of Liam Neeson from Taken character, so stoic you'd never know she has decades of preparation and training under her belt. They begin by tracking Vee and Phillip through the mountainous forest, and it feels like a really solid ground for a survival thriller.

Then Lou goes full-on badass bitch mode when they come across Phillip's friends, and the movie completely captured my attention as Janney kicks their rears and sells every millisecond of her fight choreography. After this scene, the film never really reaches this Atomic Blonde-level of butt-kicking again, but that's okay because it also wants to surprise us with a few dark twists. Her odyssey toward vengeance is not wholly unlike Nic Cage's in Pig, but it's much more exciting and less pretentious here, and she's not after an animal. In fact, she's much more closely related to the other characters than we were led to expect, and while this revelation might be a lot for some to swallow -- unrealistic as it may be -- it helps the film pack completely unexpected but well-earned emotional blows in its climax.

Suffice to say, Janney's acting chops are put on full display here, not as a dedicated character actor or even as a vehicle for a particularly nuanced character study, but rather as an action movie star who carries the whole damn thing herself. She's so smart to not waste any time developing her character; she knows Lou so well that she trims all fat from her performance, letting what she delivers in every moment inform us at breakneck speed the depth of her experience and reality. I wish the screenplay or direction leaned more heavily into dramatizing her cynical nature and flirtation with nihilism, especially once the big reveal is, well, revealed. But Janney makes do on her own, without much help from the director or writer. Hers is a masterclass from an unlikely source, and it's a marvel this movie wasn't released in cinemas. It's the kind of nose-to-the-grindstone grimy action thriller that Taylor Sheridan would be proud to have made, and I don't say that lightly.