Novocaine (2025)

Novocaine arrives with a premise that sounds engineered in a laboratory: a bank assistant manager with congenital insensitivity to pain, a kidnapped co-worker, a trail of increasingly mangled bodies. Jack Quaid plays Nathan Caine with a hangdog likability, and the film uses his condition the way a haunted house uses its ghosts, as a mechanism for set pieces. He burns a hand on a deep fryer retrieving a gun. He dislocates a thumb to slip a handcuff. The body becomes a prop, and the screenplay never asks it to mean anything more than that.

The cast is diverse in a manner that suggests a spreadsheet somewhere was satisfied. Amber Midthunder, Betty Gabriel, and Jacob Batalon fill out the ensemble with competence and no ceremony, and the film declines to remark on any of it. Sherry, the love interest, turns out to be the sister and accomplice of the lead robber, which grants her a flicker of moral complication before the plot resumes its business. This is an action comedy with a romance at its center, and it treats both with the efficiency of a studio delivering a product on schedule.

There is no sermon here. No lecture about the climate, no indictment of capital, no treatise on the body as a site of meaning. A credit union gets robbed because credit unions are where robbers go. The final image is a man eating cherry pie in a prison visiting room, smiling at the woman who deceived him. It is a small, strange, unresolved gesture, and the film earns it without a single speech. For those of us who catalog such things, the evening passes quietly.