Omaha review – John Magaro leads lean but affecting family drama

Sundance film festival: The Past Lives and September 5 actor leads a beautifully made, if slightly too withholding, road-trip drama

Omaha, Cole Webley’s debut film from a screenplay by Robert Machoian (The Killing of Two Lovers), is very much a product of the Sundance film festival, both literally – the duo first connected here – and, for better and occasionally for worse, in tone. Spare, elegiac, quiet but affecting, this John Magaro-led character study is, fittingly, filmed and mostly set in the festival’s home state (for now) of Utah. It’s a tense family drama that mostly keeps its cards close to the chest and an ode, at least visually, to the liminal, fragile states one can enter on the road in the American west.

The bedsheets are still warm and the dawn light still pale when Ella, played by remarkable newcomer Molly Belle Wright, and her younger brother Charlie (a charming Wyatt Solis) pile into the car at the behest of their tight-lipped father (Magaro). He refuses to say where they’re going beyond a “trip”, but from the way Magaro hunches his shoulders and shifts his gaze, you can assume it’s not for pleasure.

Omaha is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution