Cop Car (2015)

Cop Car is a 2015 independent road thriller in which two runaway boys steal an abandoned sheriff's cruiser and discover, at their leisure, a body in the trunk and a handgun under the seat. Jon Watts directs with a straight face and a stopwatch. Kevin Bacon plays the sheriff, a man whose corruption is personal, specific, and entirely his own. The film premiered at Sundance, drew warm notices, and earned back roughly three percent of its budget. Nobody involved appears to have labored under any illusion about what they were making.

That clarity is the film's defining quality. There is no messaging layered over the chase. The boys are boys, feral and unparented, and the script declines to diagnose them. The sheriff is a criminal because he took drug money, not because the film holds opinions about law enforcement as an institution. A woman named Bev appears, shouts at the children, and is shot for her trouble, which is a thing that happens in thrillers and not a statement about anything. Race goes unmentioned, as does nearly everything the current cultural moment tends to notice. The camera stays on the windmill and the empty highway.

We have grown accustomed to films that halt the plot and explain themselves to us. This film does not. It simply runs out of road, leaving a wounded child and a stolen car speeding toward the town lights. Whether that constitutes an achievement or a missed opportunity is a question the film refuses to answer, which is, in its own small way, admirable. A clean specimen. Nothing to grade, nothing to confiscate.