She Rides Shotgun is a lean, unforgiving crime thriller that lands with the weight of a clenched jaw and the sting of a lived-in wound. It’s the kind of film that arrives quietly, without fanfare — no Marvel tie-in, no algorithm-hungry casting. Just craft. Director Nick Rowland delivers a brutally efficient, strangely tender adaptation of Jordan Harper’s 2017 Edgar Award-winning novel, co-scripted by Harper himself, and the result is something rarely seen in today’s theatrical ecosystem: a genre piece with a beating heart and a pulse that never settles.
She Rides Shotgun Review
From the first moment Taron Egerton’s Nate McClusky appears on screen — wiry, haunted, and barely keeping it together — you feel the pressure mounting. He’s just out of prison and already spiraling into a storm he can’t dodge. He collects his 11-year-old daughter, Polly (a magnetic Ana Sophia Heger), from school. Their reunion isn’t warm. It’s freighted. Nate is the kind of man who leaves chaos trailing behind him, and Polly’s small face registers every fracture in their forced connection.
“A gripping and grounded thriller… Egerton and Heger make an unforgettable duo.”
David, Indiewire
Source: IndieWire, July 2025.
Their flight from white supremacist gangsters isn’t clean or cool; it’s bloodied, raw, and full of dread. Rowland frames their journey with a harsh beauty — broken skylines, scorched deserts, half-lit interiors — and always keeps them physically apart, until he doesn’t. When they finally share the same frame, it feels monumental. Earned. Human.
“There’s blood in its mouth and poetry in its bones. Rowland’s direction is precise, but the performances are what haunt you.”
Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
The world they inhabit feels both mythic and scarily contemporary: meth-ring neo-Nazis, corrupt lawmen, and an America where survival is a private responsibility. Polly’s arc — from wide-eyed innocence to a kind of tragic, tactical clarity — is wrenching. Heger is astonishing. She doesn’t play for cute or clever. She plays for keeps. Her performance pulses with the panic and power of a child growing up in the space of days, not years.
Egerton, meanwhile, strips away vanity. His Nate is brutal, scared, and all too real. The film lets us sit in the grime with him, daring us to find the man beneath the mask of violence.
She Rides Shotgun doesn’t just thrill. It bruises. And in a market full of synthetic spectacle, it reminds us what real stakes — and real storytelling — still look like.
Read more: The Naked Gun (2025) Review
