Tow (2025)

[BluBonnet]

Debuts at Tribeca Film Festival

Tow, (United States) – World Premiere. Based on a true story, this poignant and inspiring underdog story follows Amanda, an unhoused woman living in her car who fights a predatory towing company when they refuse to return her stolen vehicle. Directed and produced by Stephanie Laing. Written by Jonathan Keasey, Brant Boivin. Produced by Brent Stiefel, Samantha Nisenboim, Rose Byrne. With Rose Byrne, Octavia Spencer, Dominic Sessa, Ariana DeBose, Demi Lovato, Simon Rex.
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[BluBonnet]

‘Tow’ Review: Rose Byrne’s Committed Performance Grounds a Compassionate Portrait of Homelessness

A phrase that Amanda Ogle, the no-nonsense protagonist played by Rose Byrne in Stephanie Laing’s touching film Tow, hears a lot is “people like you.” Strangers reach for it when referring to her situation as an unhoused woman in Seattle, Washington, living in her car. Social services workers — or anyone tasked with helping her — use it to preface their shock at her determination. Passers-by, assuming she is down on her luck, deploy it like a compliment, as if Amanda’s intrepidness in the face of bureaucratic systems and run-of-the-mill social indifference is a testament to her personality rather than a necessary response to state failure.

Amanda has a particularly hard time stomaching this phrase when her car — a 1991 Blue Toyota Camry — gets towed. Employees of this large auto company hauled her car, which was stolen while she was interviewing for a job at a high-end pet salon, without a second thought about its value. In addition to living in the vehicle, Amanda needs the car to get the gig. When asked if she could pick up clients’ dogs, she, eager to get back on her feet and put her veterinary tech license to use, said yes. So it’s more than an inconvenience when Amanda walks out of the salon to find her car missing.

Premiering at Tribeca, Tow follows Amanda as she spends more than a year trying to get her car back from a tow yard. The film is inspired by the real story of an unhoused Seattle woman who fought an impressive legal battle against a tow company in order to get her vehicle back and clear an outrageous bill. Laing’s compassionate adaptation of the story details Amanda’s life before the tow-company nightmare and chronicles how the Seattle resident survives the city while navigating this taxing clash. Similar to Harris Dickinson’s stirring Cannes debut Urchin, Tow spotlights issues around homelessness and addiction with empathy, a grounded realism and a touch of humor.

Working from a screenplay by Jonathan Keasey, Brant Boivin and Annie Weisman, Laing (Family Squares, Irreplaceable You) opens Tow with a statistic about vehicular residents across the country: The number of people who live in their cars falls somewhere between 1 and 3 million people. When we meet Amanda, she’s floundering in an already bad job interview. When the employer asks why Amanda has a vet tech license but no college degree, she becomes deflated. The interview ends with no job.

Laing steadily shepherds viewers through glimpses of Amanda’s life: We see her charging her phone in various establishments, texting her teenage daughter Avery (Elsie Fisher) and figuring out where she can park her car and get a good night’s rest. That last task proves to be the most challenging, and the scene of Amanda being harassed by neighborhood patrol reminded me of moments in Patrick Fealey’s harrowing account of being unhoused in America, which the writer published last year in Esquire magazine. His and Amanda’s experiences underscore how expensive it is to be poor in the U.S.