Movie Review

Rose Byrne fights for her life and car in new movie 'Tow'

Rose Byrne in Tow.

Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions

Actor Rose Byrne had a banner year in 2025, getting her first Oscar nomination for her starring role in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. Although she came up short in that race, she’s getting another chance to prove her acting bona fides in the new film, Tow.

In the “inspired by a true story” movie, Byrne plays Amanda, a down-on-her-luck woman who lives in her car and can’t find a job. Living in Seattle, she tries to stay in touch with her daughter, Avery (Elsie Fisher), who lives with her dad in another city, but circumstances sometimes limit their communications, especially when her car is stolen.

The good news is that her car is found relatively quickly. The bad news is that the tow company is charging her to get her car back, money she can’t afford. Now truly homeless, she does everything in her power to right the wrong, even taking the company to court. Without much luck, she has to start staying in a women’s shelter run by Barbara (Octavia Spencer), where she makes friends with Nova (Demi Lovato) and Denise (Ariana DeBose), among others.

Directed by Stephanie Laing and written by Jonathan Keasey and Brent Boivin, the film has relatively low stakes going for it and never really tries to make the story feel deeper than it is. The situation Amanda finds herself in is clearly a tough one, and any empathetic person would feel for her and want her to overcome her plight. But the filmmakers keep things light and never try to up the drama in any significant way.

The issue Amanda is dealing with, being price gouged by a predatory towing company, is one with which many people can relate. But aside from helpfully underscoring Amanda’s frustration by showing the increasing number of days she is without a car, they never establish why they felt this particular story was one worth telling. Her personal issues, including a growing estrangement with her daughter, fail to conjure any big emotions.

The filmmakers are very loose with their storytelling, especially when it comes to side characters. The presence of the women she meets at the shelter, and Kevin (Dominic Sessa), the young lawyer who offers to help her, never makes full sense other than a need for her to have other people with whom to interact. A tighter focus on what Amanda was going through would’ve helped both her and people around her feel more important.

Byrne is a dynamic performer who’s shown great skill at both drama and comedy, but there’s nothing special about her performance here. Hampered a bit by a blonde wig and false teeth, she feels out of sorts for much of the film. The unusually high-powered supporting cast - both Spencer and DeBose are Oscar winners - makes things interesting on first blush, but none of them outside of Sessa is given much to do, so they’re mostly wasted.

Tow will be a disappointment for anyone hoping to see more great stuff from Byrne. While she remains a fine actor, her performance and the story as a whole are nowhere near the level shown in her previous film. The real life predicament shown in the film also never rises to the level of being of something worth showing to the masses.

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Tow is now showing in theaters.

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Movie Review

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma gives horror a surreal twist

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing with it a new subgenre - the slasher - that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death - a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask - may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference - Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard - to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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