A work of art can often reveal itself in its final moments – and no, we’re not talking about a rug-pulling revelation, The Usual Suspects-style. It’s when a story becomes truly complete, and that’s exactly what happens with dusty noir She Rides Shotgun. It’s a moment that we’ve seen in dozens of noirs where there’s a kid involved, and they all play out in the same bland, happy-ending fashion. Those versions take the merciless amorality of this kind of crime drama and try to inject a little sunshine, and it feels like a betrayal. The way that scene plays out in She Rides Shotgun is written within the rules of the world, and those rules are merciless.
Adopting the 2017 novel of the same name by Jordan Harper, co-writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski revisit the abyssal moral horrors of their breakout film, Super Dark Times. This remote, cold corner of New Mexico is dazzling in its emptiness, and it’s a pace where innocence can seemingly never take root. It’s astounding that Polly (Heger) has even the traces of a childhood, since her father, Nathan (Egerton), is in jail for his days running with neo-Nazi gangsters. That he suddenly turns up to pick her up from school in a clearly stolen car, and tells her a little too quickly that her mom’s OK, makes it clear to even this elementary school kid that nothing will ever be OK again.
Their script is given bleak life by director and co-writer Nick Rowland, who scored a BAFTA nomination for the equally mournful Irish gangster drama Calm With Horses (released in America with the uninspiringly generic title The Shadow of Violence). His empathy for lifelong losers like Nathan is balanced against his constant reminders that every threat and danger Polly faces is his fault. He’s the kind of idiot that hangs out with fascist drug lords – of course he thinks he can get her out of his mess.
Subtract the rock & roll cool from Badlands and you’ve got something akin to She Rides Shotgun, a violent and mournful trip through the Southwest as Nathan drags his daughter into his own quagmire. It’s a bleak and introspective movie, interrupted by outbursts of bloody, senseless violence, made tragic by the interactions between Nathan and Polly. Rowland never expects her to act like an adult trapped in a kid’s body, while still trusting the young actor to give weight to her scenes, which she more than delivers. Her actual youth is juxtaposed with Nathan’s childishness, an excellent use of Egerton’s boyish vigor that makes sense of the petty criminal’s juvenile mentality. He wants to do right by Polly, but has no clue how, and the rapport between Egerton and Heger playing different kinds of children is both captivating and heartbreaking.
However, their tragedy requires a true menace, and that comes in the bulky, barbarous, and implacable form of John Carroll Lynch as a man that is basically the god of this world of misery. It’s a performance infinitely removed from his recent role in Sorry, Baby as an avuncular sandwich slinger and makes one wonder why more people haven’t cast him as a heavy before. There’s a calm malice about his depiction of Houser, the local lawman and meth kingpin running his stretch of the desert as a white supremacist haven. He’s a vehicle for the filmmakers’ flair for harsh, stomach-churning violence, in a way that shows how wasted Collins and Piotrowski’s talents were on that studio-castrated Hellraiser revamp from 2022. When that final scene arrives, and they can truly reveal what this film has to say about the fragility of innocence, it’s a moment that will live with you after the gunfire and bloodshed fades.
This article appears in August 1 • 2025.