Mark Reviews Movies: PARADISE HIGHWAY

Paradise Highway, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 28, 2022

The plot of Paradise Highway, writer/director Anna Gutto's debut feature, consists of little more than a multi-party chase. At the center of it is a rough and desperate woman, a big-rig truck driver by trade, who just wants to help and protect the brother who helped and protected her so much during her life. That she has to participate, albeit unwillingly and clearly against her conscience, in a human-trafficking operation in order to do so puts up an unfortunately discomforting wall between us and the story and the character.

There are other issues here, mainly to do with the way this story falls into so many routines and clichés. Those elements also get in the way of the melancholy, lonely, and pained core of the tale Gutto obviously wants to tell.

It's not that Sally (Juliette Binoche), the truck driver who ends up transporting a teenage girl to keep her brother from being killed by the traffickers, isn't an intriguing character—torn between her devotion to the brother and the general, as well as personal, awfulness of what she thinks she has to do—and a potentially pointed focal point of the underlying theme of the persistence of trauma. It's just that the material surrounding the character overwhelms Sally, her past, her crisis of conscience, and the seemingly unlikely but almost inevitable bond that develops between the transporter, a victim of abuse herself, and the abused victim she's transporting as they travel the Southeastern United States.

Sally winds up in this situation on account of her brother Dennis (Frank Grillo), who is currently in prison but will be released in a matter of days (An awkward exposition dump occurs on a group call between our protagonist and some of her trucker buddies). Visiting her brother one last time before his freedom, Sally learns that Dennis' life might be in danger, and as she has in the past for him, he asks his sister to carry one last package for the criminal group whose activities landed him in prison.

When she arrives at the pick-up spot, Sally is disgusted to see that the "package" is a teenage girl named Leila (Hala Finley), but the organization's contacts (played by Christiane Seidel and Walker Babington) threaten that Dennis will be killed if she doesn't do the job. Upon arriving at the drop-off location, Leila shoots the man who's supposed to take her to some new hell. Sally is now on the run, both from the trafficking ring and the cops who are searching for the man's killer.

The rest of the narrative's focus is divided almost in two, between Sally trying to evade the gang or being arrested and the law enforcement agents investigating the circumstances that led to the killing. As to the former, Sally drives a lot, hides out at various truck stops, and tries to come up with a plan with Dennis over the phone. All the while, she has to keep the girl from being noticed—by force in a scene that Bincohe plays with considerable anguish, even though that's not quite enough to keep the persistent feeling that the girl is a pawn and the trafficking angle is little more than a plot point in this story.

Soon enough, Sally starts treating Leila with more kindness, and with unconvincing haste, the girl comes to trust the woman who's still holding her captive and, for all Leila knows, still trying to hand her over to people who have or will certainly hurt her. Obviously, Sally isn't the type, although she sure seemed to be for the entirety of the first act, and once it becomes clear that Sally does want to help the girl, there's at least a little breathing room for the two characters to relate to each other. Sally was abused by her father, which is why she's so dedicated to Dennis, and Leila's own experiences are apparent from the immediate circumstances, as well as that police investigation.

The investigation makes up the second thread of the narrative. It follows Gerick (Morgan Freeman, world-weary in the way at which he excels), a retired federal agent currently working as a consultant, and FBI Special Agent Sterling (Cameron Monaghan), a pencil-pusher who wants some field experience. If the chase plot comes close to feeling exploitative, this line of storytelling, as the two men follow Leila's trail from the dead body to a house where other girls and women like her were kept prisoner under brutal conditions, provides some sense of the horrors of what Sally's side keeps at bay or ignores to keep the chase moving.

Ultimately, though, Gerick and Sterling are just part of the pursuit, leading to some close calls (There's little suspense in them, since there's little reason to care if Sally is caught by these two under the circumstances) and one scene that wastes the pairing of leading talents with a rhetorical game of evasion. With Paradise Highway, Gutto tries to find a balance between the mechanics of a straightforward thriller and a more intimate study of trauma, but if the climactic standoff and twist are any indication, the former outweighs the latter.

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