Padraic McKinley‘s directorial debut is a brooding Depression-era survival tale that carries the weight of its genre heavily on its shoulders, straining between homage and revision without ever quite breaking free.
As part of the Berlinale Special Gala, Padraic McKinley’s debut film as a director literally adds weight to his shoulders, after being known as a producer and editor. Here in Berlin with his film The Weight, with a strong set of actors like Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, and Julia Jones, he fails to deliver a punch.
Opting to tell a story set during the Depression era in the USA, the first-time director tells a story with a simple setup of a convict forced to haul stolen gold across hostile terrain in exchange for freedom.
Set in 1930s Oregon, the film follows Samuel Murphy (Hawke), a widower yanked from his young daughter and thrown into prison, then offered a brutal bargain: carry contraband gold through treacherous wilderness for a corrupt warden (played by Crowe) and maybe walk free. It’s a premise that is almost similar to Deliverance, a 1972 film, where men are expendable labour, while nature is both spectacle and judge.
Director Padraic McKinley builds the mission like a pressure cooker: a group of prisoners, each with a narrowly sketched backstory, chained not just by shackles but by debt, race, and class. The trek itself is the narrative; the plot is less “will they make it?” than “what gets broken first: the body, the deal, or whatever remains of conscience?”
There’s a recurrent visual motif of weight redistribution, with packs hoisted and re-hoisted, straps cutting into fabric, the group pausing to adjust, renegotiate, and refuse. The film is most alive when it stays with these micro-transactions of effort: who carries more, who pretends not to notice, who watches and files it away for later. The gold constantly threatens to tip the compositions out of balance, and by extension, the fragile hierarchy within the group.
The Weight operates in a tension between classical toughness and modern self-consciousness. The cutting is patient, almost stubbornly so, allowing journeys between points to play out in something like real time. This is where the film’s 1970s inheritance feels most palpable, an insistence that duration itself is part of the ordeal, that we need to sit with the boredom, the trudging, and the minor injuries for the later ruptures to mean anything.
The landscapes (shot in Bavaria as stand-ins for Oregon) are shot to showcase the ruggedness and grandeur. Snow, mud, and water are less aesthetic elements than hostile mediums the men must move through. McKinley and his cinematographer lean into murky skies, half-fogged horizons, frames where the path ahead is never fully visible. The wilderness doesn’t mirror the characters’ inner lives; it shrugs at them.
Ethan Hawke’s character literally carries most of the weight, although he is not a strong man but more of a middle-aged, worn-out, small-built man, clever enough to read the situation and observe. The camera often composes the prisoners as a fraying horizontal band against the vertical insistence of rock faces and pine trunks, a classic wilderness framing that McKinley uses less to romanticise nature than to underline the smallness of human leverage.
Hawke’s work here is intriguingly recessive. It’s a performance built out of refusals: to grandstand, to tidy up Samuel’s contradictions, to make his love for his daughter into a simple alibi. His few explicit emotional beats feel less like climaxes than like leaks in an already over-pressurised vessel.
Julia Jones’s Anna complicates the film’s gendered and racial geometry without ever being reduced to conscience or guide. The way she occupies the frame, often on the edge, watching the men from a slight elevation or distance, gives her an external position, as if she were simultaneously in the story and commenting on the very fantasy of redemptive male ordeal.
Russell Crowe, meanwhile, seems to relish the near-Brechtian clarity of Warden Clancy: his presence tilts scenes. He doesn’t play evil so much as the everyday fluency of power, the way a man at the top of the food chain can switch between paternal charm and bureaucratic menace without changing his tone.
By the final stretch, the title has layered itself several times over. There is the literal weight of the gold, of course; the weight of the years Samuel has already lost; the weight of histories that Anna carries but refuses to narrativize for the benefit of the others. But there is also the weight of the genre itself, a whole tradition of men-in-peril cinema bearing down on the film, asking it to pick a side between homage and revision.
This film never quite breaks that tradition open, but it scuffs it, tires it out, and lets it breathe hard in the cold air. For all its occasional compromises, it leaves lingering images rather than tidy meanings: silhouettes inching along a ridge; a pack of gold abandoned for a few stolen minutes of rest; a shared look between two characters who know that the deal they signed onto was rigged from the start. It feels like it’s carrying something genuinely worth the strain. The Weight feels like an old-fashioned survival picture that keeps circling back to a single question: what does freedom cost when it’s already been priced in advance?
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
