No Exit (2022)

Here is a film that understands the value of keeping its moral ambitions small, which is to say it has none to speak of. No Exit strands a recovering addict named Darby at a snowbound rest stop, hands her a kidnapped child locked in a van, and then spends eighty minutes deciding which of four strangers is the kidnapper. Havana Rose Liu anchors the proceedings with a weary competence, and the choice of an Asian American actress to play a scrappy survivor of opioid addiction is a quiet novelty. The movie never stops to admire it. There is a blizzard to survive and a nail gun to fire.

The supporting cast is diverse in the casual manner of a well-cast thriller, with Black and Latino performers filling out the suspect pool, and none of them exist to illustrate a thesis. A human trafficking ring supplies the villains, though the screenplay treats it as criminal machinery instead of an indictment of anything larger. Gambling debts motivate a betrayal. The snow falls. Nobody delivers a speech about the housing crisis or the warming of the planet, and the blizzard remains a convenience of geography. This is a lean piece of work, and lean is its own kind of integrity.

Darby is resourceful, physically durable, and permitted to snort heroin in order to pull a nail from her own wrist. That is a striking image, and it belongs to a tradition of survival cinema that predates our current anxieties by several decades. Whether a female lead of this caliber amounts to an argument about gender is a question the film declines to answer. It declines most questions. The remainder is a serviceable streaming diversion, competently made, and innocent of the sermon. In an era of exhaustingly earnest entertainment, that innocence registers as a small, strange relief.