115 min | R | July 29, 2022 | Lionsgate
A female long-haul trucker discovers her latest cargo is not freight but a girl, and the network she works for has no intention of letting either of them walk away. Then a dead brother, a federal agent, and a retired cop all converge on the same lonely stretch of interstate. The road is the only honest thing in it.
Sally drives a big rig and runs side deliveries for the men who control her route. The deliveries are children. When a girl named Leila ends up in her cab instead of the expected handoff, Sally refuses to complete the trade and runs. Paradise Highway wants to be a thriller about human trafficking and the working-class women the system uses as mules. What it actually delivers is a chase that hits every mark you can see coming from a mile down the road.
Juliette Binoche plays Sally with a flattened American accent and a permanent crouch of guilt. She commits to the exhaustion of a woman who has been laundering her own conscience for years. The work is honest even when the script gives her nothing surprising to do. Hala Finley plays Leila with a guarded toughness that the film keeps softening into sentiment. Morgan Freeman plays Gerick, a retired cop on the case, and spends most of his scenes in a car explaining the plot to Cameron Monaghan’s Agent Sterling. Frank Grillo plays Dennis, the handler, as pure menace with no interior, which is all the part offers him.
Anna Gutto writes and directs her first feature and stages the trafficking network as a series of CB-radio handoffs at truck stops and rest areas. The detail is the strongest idea in the film. The cinematography favors washed grays and the cold geometry of loading docks, and it sells the loneliness of the long haul. The editing undercuts that mood by cross-cutting to Freeman and Monaghan’s procedural scenes, which drain the tension every time they appear. The score pushes hard at moments the images already cover.
The film has a real subject and a cast that could carry a harder version of it. Gutto keeps reaching for the conventions of the on-the-run thriller instead of trusting the specificity of her own world. Every escalation arrives on schedule and resolves on schedule. Binoche and Freeman deserve a movie that earns their presence. This one borrows their weight and spends it on a plot that knows exactly where it is going and gets there without a single detour.