No Sudden Move: Suspensefully riveting

No Sudden Move (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, violence and sexual candor

Available via: HBO Max

By Derrick Bang

Fans of slow-burn crime thrillers will love this one.

 

Scripter Ed Solomon’s noir-ish saga is given precisely the right look and atmosphere by director Steven Soderbergh and production designer Hannah Beachler. The post-WWII Detroit setting emphasizes the deplorable racial divide between cozy white neighborhoods and decaying inner-city Black districts, and the wary mistrust this prompts from both sides.

 

Having maneuvered their way up the conspiratorial food chain, Ronald (Benicio Del Toro,
left) and Curt (Don Cheadle) are startled by where they've suddenly wound up.

Soderbergh’s camera glides languidly along both sets of streets, as if perched atop a slow-moving vehicle; he frequently employs a fish-eyed lens, which distorts the image at both edges. This adds to the unsettling, overall sense of disorientation experienced by our fish-out-of-water protagonists. (As he has done before, Soderbergh “hides” behind the pseudonym “Peter Andrews,” when he handles his own cinematography.)

The year is 1954. Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), recently released from prison, is offered a job by shady go-between Jones (Brendan Fraser). It sounds simple enough: babysit the family of low-level General Motors executive Matt Wertz (David Harbour) for a couple of hours.

 

“Babysit,” meaning “guard at gunpoint while something goes down elsewhere.”

 

Jones also recruits Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), similarly down on his luck, who isn’t wild about sharing a job with, ah, someone of color. (Cheadle’s dry amusement, when the two men share the back seat of Jones’ car, is priceless.) The little gang is augmented further by Charley Barnes (Kieran Culkin), who outlines the plan.

 

Charley will “escort” Matt to his office, to retrieve a document from a certain safe. Curt and Ronald will keep Matt’s family at home: wife Mary (Amy Seimetz) and their two children, Matthew Jr. (Noah Jupe) and Peggy (Lucy Holt). The three criminals will remain masked the entire time; if everybody cooperates, everybody lives.

 

The raw intensity of the early morning home invasion is palpable, as Mary and her children are startled by the sudden appearance of these three menacing intruders. Curt’s calming words do little to ease the atmosphere of terror; Seimetz’s performance is sublime, as the terrified Mary — and we — expect something awful to happen, at any moment.