The Lantern Road review: a thriller that knows when to whisper

Cast

Priya Nandakumar, Mateo Solis, June Okafor

Director

Dalton Reyes

Runtime

2h 8m

There's a long stretch in the middle of The Lantern Road where nothing happens except two people talking on a phone, and it's the best twenty minutes in a theater I've had all year. Dalton Reyes' third feature is a thriller built almost entirely out of restraint — long silences, unresolved tension, a camera that refuses to cut away from a face a second before it should.

The setup

Priya Nandakumar plays Elena Voss, an overnight highway patrol dispatcher working a stretch of interstate in the mountains during an ice storm. Mateo Solis is Cal Pruitt, a long-haul trucker who calls in not to report a wreck but to say, without quite saying it, that he doesn't plan to make it through the night. The entire film takes place over the six hours between that call and dawn, splitting time between Elena's dispatch booth and Cal's cab as the storm closes the road behind him.

It would be easy to make this premise mawkish. Reyes doesn't. Elena isn't a trained counselor and the script never pretends she has the right words — she has training for traffic incidents and almost nothing for this, and the film is honest about how much she's improvising. June Okafor shows up forty minutes in as Elena's supervisor, Marguerite, and the scenes between the two women, arguing in whispers about whether to send help down a road that may already be impassable, carry as much weight as anything between the two leads.

What the camera does instead of talking

Cinematographer Beatrix Fjell shoots almost the entire film in two boxes: Elena's dispatch booth, lit by the cold glow of monitors, and Cal's cab, lit only by his dashboard and the sweep of his headlights against snow. The visual rhyme between them does a lot of the film's emotional work without a word of dialogue — two people, each alone in a small lit room in the middle of a dark world, talking to each other without being able to see each other.

The sound design deserves equal credit. Composer Idris Vane barely scores the film at all; most of what you hear is wind, static, and the specific texture of tire chains on ice. When a score finally does arrive, in the last ten minutes, it lands like a held breath being let out.

"I didn't want this to be a movie about a trucker on a bridge. I wanted it to be a movie about two people's jobs, and what it costs to do one of them honestly." — Dalton Reyes, in the film's press notes

How it compares to Reyes' earlier work

Reyes' first two features — a heist thriller and a kidnapping drama, both competent, neither especially distinctive — gave little indication he had this kind of patience in him. Both earlier films were plotted tightly and shot conventionally, hitting genre beats on schedule without much interest in the space between them. The Lantern Road feels like the work of a director who spent those two films learning the mechanics of tension so he could spend this one deliberately withholding it.

The clearest sign of that growth is in how little the film explains itself. Reyes' earlier work tended to over-script its characters' motivations, giving them speeches that told the audience exactly what to feel. Here, Elena's reasons for staying on the line with Cal through her entire shift are never stated outright — we infer them from small details, a photo on her dispatch desk, a line about her own brother that she cuts herself off from finishing. It's a more mature kind of filmmaking, and it suggests Reyes has more interesting films ahead of him than the two that got him this job.

Where it stumbles

The back half isn't flawless. A subplot involving Elena's estranged brother gets introduced with twenty minutes left and never quite earns its space — it feels like a studio note asking for more "stakes" in a film that already had plenty. And the final image, a wide shot of the cleared highway at sunrise, tips slightly toward the sentimental after ninety minutes of admirable restraint.

• The brother subplot adds exposition the film doesn't need.
• One late scene breaks the two-location structure and loses momentum.
• The closing shot oversells a note the film had already made quietly.

Why it's still one to see in a theater

None of that undoes what works. The Lantern Road is a studio-funded thriller willing to sit in silence, trust two performances to carry an hour of screen time without a cut, and resist the urge to manufacture a car chase it clearly could have afforded. Nandakumar's performance in particular — mostly just her face, lit by a monitor, listening — is the kind of work that tends to get overlooked because so little of it is "acting" in the showy sense. It should not be overlooked.

This is also, bluntly, a film that benefits from a real sound system and a dark room full of strangers who aren't checking their phones. The static and wind in that sound mix are doing more work than you'll notice at home with the volume at a polite nighttime level.

The verdict

Four stars. The Lantern Road isn't a perfect thriller, but it's a confident one, and confidence is rarer than perfection. If you've been waiting for a reason to get back into a theater this fall instead of waiting for a streaming date, this is it — and it's worth seeing before a weaker brother subplot and a slightly oversold ending are the only things anyone remembers about it.

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