Rose Byrne had a great 2025. Technically it bled into 2026, the year she actually heard the words “Academy Award nominee,” but the film that earned her that recognition, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, was released in 2025. It was excellent, one of my ten favorite films of the year, and easily the best performance of her career. That’s a tough act to follow, but she’s followed it up with another terrific performance in a film that, for some reason, seems to have entered the witness protection program. Did you even know she starred in a movie this year called Tow?
The strange thing is that Tow isn’t exactly lacking for talent. Alongside Rose Byrne, you’ve got Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer, Academy Award winner Ariana DeBose, Dominic Sessa, Demi Lovato, Elsie Fisher, and Simon Rex. That’s a cast most independent films would kill for, yet Tow somehow got lost in the shuffle. Released by an independent distributor around the same time people were still talking about Byrne’s Oscar nomination, it almost feels like nobody quite knew how to position it. That’s a shame because, in today’s economy, a story about someone living out of their car, struggling with addiction, trying to rebuild their life, and fighting an endless bureaucratic nightmare is probably more relatable than ever.
Rose Byrne plays Amanda Ogle, an unhoused woman living out of her aging car while desperately trying to put her life back together. Early on, she’s interviewing for a job, hoping this might finally be the opportunity that lets her climb out of extreme poverty. Her daughter, Avery, played by Elsie Fisher, lives with her father, and Amanda’s car isn’t just transportation. It’s her home, her storage unit, and the only reliable way she has to visit her daughter. It’s an old, beat-up piece of junk, which somehow makes it even stranger that anybody would want to steal it.
But that’s exactly what happens. While Amanda is inside her interview, someone steals the car, takes it for a joyride, abandons it, and it eventually gets towed away. Even after filing a police report explaining that the vehicle was stolen, the towing company refuses to release it unless she pays the fees. And those fees don’t just stop. Every day the car sits behind their fence, the bill keeps growing. It’s essentially hostage money, and Amanda doesn’t have a job, a home, or any meaningful possessions left because everything she owned was inside that vehicle.
One of the few sympathetic people she encounters is Kevin, played by Simon Rex, an employee at the impound lot who understands how ridiculous the situation is but can only do so much from behind the counter. Amanda eventually begins staying at a halfway house run by Barb, played by Octavia Spencer, where she’s trying to maintain her sobriety while getting back on her feet. It’s there that we also meet residents played by Ariana DeBose and Demi Lovato, who are dealing with struggles of their own while trying to rebuild their lives.
Eventually Amanda decides to fight back through the legal system, taking the towing company to court. They don’t even bother to appear, so the judge rules in her favor and orders the vehicle returned. Problem solved, right? Not even close. The company simply refuses to comply, and Amanda quickly discovers that winning in court and actually enforcing a judgment are two very different things. That’s when she meets a compassionate young attorney, played by Dominic Sessa, who takes her case pro bono. Together they begin navigating an increasingly absurd legal maze, standing up to a towing company with far more money, resources, and patience for dragging things out than either of them possess. I kept asking myself the same question throughout the film: how hard is it to just give this woman her car back? The amount of time, money, and effort everyone spends avoiding the obvious solution becomes almost unbelievable, but unfortunately not entirely unrealistic.
The film slowly transforms into a legal battle where Amanda, someone with absolutely no legal training, has to educate herself on the justice system just to reclaim her beat-up old car. That’s what makes the movie so effective. The car isn’t really the point. It’s her home. It’s her independence. It’s her connection to her daughter. Every obstacle placed between Amanda and that vehicle becomes another obstacle keeping her from rebuilding her life.
Rose Byrne delivers another lovely performance here. It’s very different from the manic energy she brought to If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, so I don’t think it’s fair to compare the two directly. But this is another box checked for her as the kind of actress who belongs in the awards conversation. Sure, the film can become a little overly sentimental as it embraces the idea that Amanda, despite having no job, spends so much time and effort trying to recover her vehicle that it effectively becomes a full-time job in itself. The irony, of course, is that she never gets paid for any of that work. She simply pours countless hours into recovering property that was stolen from her, after already reporting it stolen and after already winning in court. The fact that she still has to keep fighting after all of that is completely bizarre.
The supporting cast is equally solid. Dominic Sessa continues making the transition into adult roles, and playing a young attorney here helps move him beyond the prep school image that launched his career in The Holdovers. It’s the kind of role that should help casting directors start seeing him outside of high school and college movies. Octavia Spencer delivers exactly the kind of warm, compassionate performance you’d expect from her, while Demi Lovato and Ariana DeBose each bring something different as recovering addicts dealing with their own challenges. Simon Rex and Elsie Fisher don’t receive a tremendous amount of screen time, but both make the most of what they’re given.
To my knowledge, Tow was never given an audio description track, so I’m reviewing this one by going in blind. Did that matter? A little bit. It always matters. But in terms of simply following the story, I was mostly able to keep up. The biggest frustration is that the central “character” in the film is really the car. It’s an object that obviously can’t speak for itself, yet so much of the story revolves around where it is, what condition it’s in, what’s inside it, and how it’s changing over time. Those are exactly the kinds of visual details audio description could have helped fill in.
I came here because I wanted to see what Rose Byrne would do next after becoming an Academy Award nominee, and she didn’t disappoint. I just wish more people had the opportunity to see this film. Even if that meant premiering it as a streaming original, I think it would have found a much larger audience than it ultimately did. Honestly, I think I could stop a hundred people on the street, and not one of them would know Rose Byrne had a movie out this year called Tow. That’s a problem.
Tow isn’t the best film Rose Byrne has ever made, and it probably won’t end up being one of the movies people remember most from her career. But she’s certainly made weaker ones. What this is is a solid, uplifting drama about perseverance, resilience, and refusing to let a broken system convince you to give up. Sometimes, if you stick with something long enough, good things really can happen, even when it feels like all hope is lost. And honestly, isn’t that the kind of warm, fuzzy message worth spending an hour and a half with? I think so.
Fresh: 7.0/10
