Outrun the Storm or Become Part of It

Read Time:6 Minute, 27 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Delivery Run
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Genre: Horror, Thriller
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 24m
Director(s): Joey Palmroos
Writer(s): Joey Palmroos, Anders Holmes
Cast: Alexander Arnold, Jussi Lampi, Liam James Collins, Arthur Sylense, Nadine Higgin
Where to Watch: on UK digital October 6, 2025

RAVING REVIEW: DELIVERY RUN doesn’t try to reinvent the survival thriller, but it understands what makes the genre work: desperation, isolation, and one terrible night that refuses to end. Set across icy backroads and dimly lit stretches of nowhere, it follows a man with nowhere left to go and too much debt to turn back. Alexander Arnold plays Lee, a delivery driver whose gambling habit and bad decisions have caught up to him. After a night of risky bets and half-formed lies, one small act of defiance sets off a chain reaction — and somewhere out in the dark, a snowplow starts following him. What begins as an inconvenience turns into a pursuit, and what starts as a chase becomes a reckoning.

Arnold gives the film its heartbeat. He plays Lee with a sharpness, the kind of man who’s learned how to survive but not how to stop living there. You see calculation flicker behind his eyes in every exchange — a man constantly measuring cost versus consequence. When the faceless driver pushes him off his route and into survival mode, Arnold’s performance shifts from cynical to raw, his smirks giving way to exhaustion. He’s not an action hero; he’s an everyman forced to confront the price of his shortcuts. That unraveling grounds the movie, giving it more substance than its minimalist setup suggests.

The film’s best stretch comes once the chase fully takes hold. As the night widens and the snow deepens, the story finds its measure. Each stop along the route becomes a test — a gas station that feels like a trap, an empty bridge that is screaming with tension, a patch of thin ice that mirrors the fragility of Lee’s moral footing. The further he drives, the clearer it becomes that the plow isn’t the only thing pursuing him. He’s being haunted by bad habits, debts, and the creeping realization that this might be the bill coming due. The film works best when it turns the physical chase into a metaphor for accountability — when evasion becomes self-evaluation.

The plow itself is an interesting foil. Its bulky shape and industrial roar feel almost mythic, a faceless force that’s less about revenge and more about inevitability. You see its blade before you see its driver, a steel grin cutting through the dark. Jussi Lampi plays the unseen stalker with restraint; he’s a presence, not a personality. That anonymity is what makes him frightening — there’s no motive to dissect, no dialogue to overexplain. The film understands that sometimes the simplest horror is being pursued by something that refuses to quit.

The film makes smart use of its limitations. The lighting is harsh and unforgiving. Roads glisten with a kind of cruel realism — not stylized, just miserable. Every gust of wind feels like a taunt. The sound design sells the danger: the low rumble of the plow engine, the crunch of tires on ice, the scrape that seems to echo inside your own teeth. It’s tactile in a way most streaming thrillers forget how to be. The environment isn’t just background; it’s a character that punishes everyone equally.

The movie struggles with the pulse of its setup. The first act spends too long arranging debts, “bad guys,” and bad luck before the central conflict truly ignites. It’s not wasted, but it slows the fuse. Once the chase begins, repetition creeps in — close calls that feel familiar, moments that don’t escalate as they could. Each obstacle should reveal something new about Lee’s limits; instead, a few just replay the same lesson with different scenery.

DELIVERY RUN has richer depth than it shows. It gestures toward commentary on gig work and debt culture — how people like Lee exist in a constant state of triage, choosing which crisis to handle first and which one to ignore until it ends him. There’s a tragedy in how his tools, meant to keep him afloat — his phone, his car, his route app — eventually become liabilities. When they fail him, he’s left with nothing but instinct, and that’s when the film finds its soul. The survival becomes less about outrunning a machine and more about outrunning the version of himself that keeps taking the easy way out.

The movie knows what it wants to be: cold, fast, and stripped of comfort. A few jokes surface — an awkward exchange here, a bitter one-liner there — but the humor stays buried under the weight of the night. The film’s commitment to momentum is admirable. Even when the pacing falters, it never feels dishonest about what it is: a story about how people back themselves into corners and call it circumstance.

Arnold carries the final act. By then, the question isn’t whether he’ll survive the night, but whether he’ll learn anything from it. The last stretch doesn’t overreach; it settles into a quieter, more believable evolution. Lee doesn’t find redemption — just a moment of clarity, the kind that only arrives when there’s nothing left to lose. It’s a small victory, but in a film this stripped down, small victories are all that matter.

What’s here works. DELIVERY RUN isn’t polished or profound, but it’s steady, lean, and driven by a strong central performance that keeps it human. It’s the kind of film that doesn’t need to roar to leave a mark — a quiet, frostbitten survival story that finds meaning not in triumph, but in endurance. It’s a film that earns the middle ground honestly — the kind of story that does enough to keep you engaged but not enough to stay with you. Not every film has to be great or terrible; some simply exist in the space between, where craft and effort meet limitation. DELIVERY RUN lives there — flawed, sincere, and worth the ride, even if it never quite breaks free of the road it’s on.

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[photo courtesy of PLAION PICTURES, ARCTIC RENEGADES, JACKRABBIT MEDIA, SABAN FILMS]

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