One night during a torrential storm, Hannah’s abusive husband Philip (Logan Marshall-Green) kidnaps Vee and takes off through the woods towards the coast.
Hannah and Lou join forces to track down the kidnapper.
Making their task harder, Philip is ex-special forces.
But what Hannah does not know is that Lou has a skillset of her own…
Usually when a small-scale action movie like Lou tries to tie itself to the realities of geopolitics, the moral quicksand of war, and the toll it takes on its participants, it is a recipe for disaster.
The conventions and expectations of genre can be either negated by, or trivialise its real world context.
Lou is a minor key action thriller - it is mostly a trek through the woods, with a few setpieces at the bookend and spritzed evenly throughout.
With a different cast and approach, it could have been a generic action movie.
What stands out about it is the way the movie is not elevated by Allison Janney’s steely performance, but complements it.
This is not simply a case of casting a character performer against type as a genre lead.
Lou is a character dealing with deep regrets, and the movie is ultimately about her confronting the failures of her past.
The action is appropriately close-quarters and gnarly. Janney is convincing as a physical presence, but the filmmakers ensure that she is still a mature person dealing with the effects of age, on top of the various injuries she gains from her various scraps.
Janney is equally powerful in the film’s quieter moments, conveying a lifetime of regret in terse glances and clipped lines. It is an economical and minimalist performance that gains impact from Janney’s embodiment of the character’s emotional repression.
Jurnee Smollett gets the less showy role as Hannah. The character starts out with one primary motivation, and there are points where it seems like she will be stuck playing Lou’s sidekick/audience surrogate, but the script continues to provide curveballs which complicate their relationship. Smollet inflects the character’s despair and helplessness with a rage and drive that prevents her from ever feeling like a tagalong.
The script’s emotional complications enrich Logan Marshall-Green’s performance as well. What could have been a cookie-cutter bad guy from a million 90s thrillers instead is a bad guy motivated by trauma and rage. The movie does not try to excuse Philip’s behaviour, but muddies what could have been an easy black-white binary. What makes Marshall-Green’s performance so good is the way in which he is constantly undermining the character by letting him show signs of weakness and self-awareness.
It is a deliberate inversion to Janney’s po-face and continues the film’s refusal to stick with simplistic moral separations.
With the film’s willingness to be complicated, it is worth bringing up the time period.
Setting the film in the eighties feels like a deliberate comment on the period’s portrayal of America’s foreign policy, and the popular images associated with the action films of the period - particularly those films which sought to cast US strategies against specific countries as simple conflicts between good and evil.
Lou is aware of the real context these eighties films ignored, and is ultimately about the importance of consequence. In eighties action films, capable heroes went around the world defeating endless armies of bad guys and coming home without any concern for collateral damage. In Lou, actions have consequences.
Written by Maggie Cohn andJack Stanley, and directed by Anna Foerster, Lou is a Netflix movie that works as both an action showcase for its star, and a thoughtful reworking of its genres’ usual themes.
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