A DIY Crime Film That Actually Feels Dangerous

Read Time:6 Minute, 3 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Rolling
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Genre: Crime, Comedy, Thriller
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 40m
Director(s): Robert DeBoucher, Ethan Spotts
Writer(s): Robert DeBoucher, Ethan Spotts
Cast: Cora Cleary, Vaune Suitt, Justin Powell, Manny Liotta, Robert Enriquez, Peter Winkelmann
Where to Watch: available now, stream here: www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: One bad day would be manageable. ROLLING starts with about six of them stacked on top of each other. Alice “loses” her job, gets hit with another rent increase, confronts a landlord who represents everything wrong with her situation (and landlords in general), and then watches a terrible decision create an even bigger problem. From there, the film turns into a frantic scramble for survival, but what makes it work isn't the escalating chaos. It's the feeling that every disaster grows out of frustrations that were already simmering beneath the surface long before the first body hits the floor.

That reality matters because the movie gets pretty ridiculous. Drugs, murder, tough guys, drug dealers, panic spirals, and enough impulsive stupidity to derail multiple lives all crash into each other over the course of a hundred sweaty, modern-day thriller minutes. Yet even at its messiest, the film rarely feels detached from the emotional burnout driving its characters forward.

Alice and Viv aren’t criminal masterminds. They barely feel like functional humans some days. Alice works herself into the ground as a mechanic while dealing with exploitation from both her employer and her landlord. Viv approaches life with the kind of permanently baked, wanna-be-actor detachment that reads as comic relief until the film reveals how much fear lies beneath her avoidance. When the two confront their landlord aboard his yacht and accidentally trigger a violent chain reaction, the movie doesn’t frame the moment like liberation. It feels frantic and shockingly relatable. That ultimately becomes the film’s strongest idea to lean on.

Robert DeBoucher and Ethan Spotts wrote and directed the movie as if they were trying to outrun collapse alongside their characters. Conversations overlap. Interiors feel cramped and overheated. The Los Angeles presented here doesn’t resemble the polished Hollywood fantasy so much as a city held together by desperation, drugs, side hustles, and people one missed paycheck away from disaster. The filmmakers clearly understand the appeal of grimy 90s indie crime films, but they avoid turning the aesthetic into empty nostalgia. The dirtiness serves a purpose. This feels like the made-for-TV thriller of the modern age, with a twist, and I’m here for it!

Cora Cleary carries a lot of the film's emotion as Alice spends most of the runtime somewhere between panic attacks, rage spirals, and an emotional shutdown. Yet Cleary keeps her recognizable rather than reducing her to a collection of quirks. She gives the character enough exhaustion that even the dumbest choices feel rooted in something real. Alice doesn’t suddenly become reckless because the plot requires escalation. She’s already operating at the edge before the story even starts.

Vaune Suitt plays Viv with a completely different cadence. She’s funny without feeling forced to deliver “funny character moments.” Much of the humor comes from Viv's understanding of exactly how catastrophic their situation is, while still approaching most conversations as if she’s trying to avoid reality through sheer force of personality. The chemistry between Cleary and Suitt ends up doing enormous heavy lifting for the movie. Without that relationship working, the film probably collapses under the weight of its own escalating chaos. Instead, their connection gives ROLLING an emotional anchor beneath all the violence and absurdity.

Justin Powell’s Smiley becomes effective because the performance avoids exaggeration. He doesn’t play the character like a generic psychopath. Smiley moves through the movie with a calmness that makes the violence feel more unpredictable. Every time the film cuts back to him, the tension spikes because he’s on an entirely different (and often broken) wavelength than Alice and Viv. They’re improvising survival. He’s methodical.

At times, though, the movie pushes its energy so aggressively that it risks exhausting itself. The script occasionally mistakes escalation for progression, throwing new complexities into the story before the previous ones have been solved. A little more modulation could’ve made certain emotional turns hit harder. One scene in particular, when the leads go on a bit of a “trip,” feels so chaotic, almost to the level of sensory overload. I get it, I understand what was trying to be attempted, but it was a lot.

The ambition here is hard not to admire. This isn’t one of those sanitized indie crime films pretending to be rough around the edges while secretly playing everything safe. ROLLING genuinely feels scrappy. It feels handmade. Sometimes that results in imperfections. Sometimes scenes overextend themselves. But the movie’s personality remains strong enough that the roughness becomes part of the experience rather than something to be apologized for.

There’s also something refreshing about how direct the film becomes beneath all the cynicism. For all its blood, drugs, screaming, and spiraling absurdity, the movie still understands that Alice and Viv are trying to protect some version of a future together, even if neither of them has the emotional toolset to build one. That underlying tenderness keeps the story from collapsing into nihilism.

A lot of films claim to capture generational frustration while still filtering everything through refined irony and market-tested rebellion. ROLLING actually feels irritated. It feels cornered. It feels like it was made by people who understand how quickly survival can begin to resemble absurdity. That gives the movie far more staying power than its premise initially suggests. It may not always control its chaos perfectly, but honestly, that instability becomes part of the appeal. ROLLING moves like a film made by people kicking against the walls around them, trying to turn anxiety, anger, and exhaustion into something loud enough to matter.

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[photo courtesy of PINK BEAR, INDICAN PICTURES]

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