Berlinale's best suprise is both a debut and an Ethan Hawke showcase
Tuesday, February 17, 2026 at 5:00PM by Elisa Giudici
Ethan Hawke in THE WEIGHT, which premiered at Sundance and now hits Berlin.
The most galvanizing film of this year’s Berlinale didn’t screen in competition, having opened at Sundance last month. It’s a debut directed by an Irish editor few outside industry circles could have named a month ago. After The Weight, that anonymity will surely be temporary. Padraic McKinley (previously known for cutting mid-tier commercial fare) announces himself here with a thriller of such muscular clarity that it easily eclipses many of the films vying for the Golden Bear...
Set in Oregon in 1933, deep into the Great Depression, the film builds from a premise so elemental it borders on archetype: a father will do anything to get back to his daughter. Murphy (Ethan Hawke), widowed and unlucky rather than criminally inclined, finds himself imprisoned by circumstance. His daughter faces institutionalization and eventual foster placement; he has promised her he will return. When Clancy (Russell Crowe), the calculating director of the labor camp where Murphy serves part of his sentence, offers him a covert opportunity for early release, Murphy recognizes both the illegality and the necessity; It is the only shortcut available.
The job is brutally simple. Before Roosevelt’s looming seizure of private gold reserves triggers panic, Murphy and a small crew must illegally transport a cache of gold bars from a remote mine through the Oregon forest to a rendezvous point. Two armed guards will escort four convicts on foot. Payment: freedom and a wage. If even one bar goes missing, the agreement collapses.
What follows is a six-day crossing structured as escalating ordeal where the weight of the gold (literal and moral) defines every frame. The group is joined unexpectedly by an Indigenous woman (Julia Jones) who claims no interest in the bullion, only in escape, but suspicion accumulates alongside physical exhaustion. Poachers, drifters, unseen watchers in the woods: the forest never feels empty.
McKinley stages the journey with tactile precision. One sequence, already destined for festival lore, involves the men passing gold bars one by one across a rotting rope bridge rather than risk the full load collapsing it: a perverse, tension-drenched echo of the baseball games Clancy romanticizes. Another, set during a torrential night storm, renders a murder visible only in lightning flashes, each illumination offering partial information, leaving both protagonist and viewer uncertain about what truly occurred. It’s classical suspense filmmaking: visual storytelling prioritized over exposition, atmosphere over noise.
The screenplay, credited to Leo Scherman, Shelby Gaines (who also co-composed the score), and especially Matthew Booi - who conceived the story while researching Depression-era gold speculation and fraud - is deceptively spare. Its strength lies in structural discipline: stakes are clear, motivations are clean, with no flourish. McKinley, who also edits the film himself, favors a lean cutting style that accentuates the materiality of the forest, the sweat of the men under the gold’s weight. The aesthetic nods to Friedkin’s The Wages of Fear by way of the western and the heist film, yet it never feels derivative. The Weight is channeling classical genre grammar without embalming it.
The result is cinema that feels almost unfashionably “old school.” Rather than chase hyperreal grit, McKinley embraces a slightly heightened visual construction, somewhere between illustration and pulp panel. A poetic transition from a full moon dissolving into the silhouettes of the next scene signals that this is crafted storytelling, not documentary mimicry. Even a circular narrative device linking the opening and closing images feels earned rather than schematic.
At the center stands Ethan Hawke, operating at full voltage. Murphy is less psychologically baroque than many of Hawke’s recent roles, closer to a western topos: the fundamentally decent man cornered into risk. Yet Hawke gives him tensile presence. There’s physicality here, too (hauling, climbing, enduring — that underscores the character’s desperation. Hawke’s recent career choices (First Reformed, Linklater’s Blue Moon, The Black Phone) reveal a performer with sharp instinct for material. He elevates smaller projects by committing fully to their tonal demands, and The Weight benefits enormously from that discernment.
He’s surrounded by a cast of largely unglamorous, effective character actors whose weathered faces and hard edges suit the terrain. Russell Crowe, in one of his sharpest performances in years, injects Clancy with a calculating ambiguity that complicates the power dynamic without overplaying it. Even the film’s limited female roles register vividly; particularly the witty Murphy’s daughter, whose presence hovers as emotional anchor rather than sentimental manipulation.
If one were to fault the film, it might be for its unabashed classicism. There is little overt revisionism here, no attempt to subvert genre expectations for the sake of novelty. But the Depression-era forest setting offers a fresh backdrop for conventions often confined to deserts or plains. The masculinity on display is rugged without slipping into caricature, and the film’s moral center remains clear-eyed.
Between rigged cars, illicit gold, baseball metaphors, and desperate wagers, The Weight positions itself as a potential cult favorite in a genre space that contemporary cinema visits too rarely, and seldom with this precision. That it arrives as a directorial debut makes its command even more striking. At a festival searching for discovery, this one feels unequivocal.
Previously at Berlinale
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