An Ever-Wonderful Rose Byrne Helps Elevate A Heartwarming-Yet-Familiar Drama

After a decade of largely spending her time in the world of comedies, the past couple of years have seen Rose Byrne finally getting back to showcasing her more dramatic range. This most notably built up to her 2026 Oscar nomination for Mary Bronstein’s anxiety-inducing drama If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, a career first – but that fact doesn’t do her newest movie, Tow, any favors. It’s something of a disappointment that the film, as a whole, fails to live up to Byrne’s great work in it. It’s certainly not a bad film. It fails to do anything really different with its true story, and has various characters who feel two-dimensional at best, but it also has enough heart and solid work from its cast that it doesn’t completely drop the ball.

Tow Has A Lot To Say, But Speaks With A Tepid Voice

Inspired by a true story, Byrne leads the ensemble Tow cast as Amanda Ogle, a middle-aged woman in Seattle who has spent some time living out of her 1990s Toyota Camry, hoping for the break that will get her back on her feet and reunited with her estranged daughter, Avery. Just as she lands a job working for a boutique pet cleaner, Amanda’s car is stolen and impounded, leaving her all the more aimless without her home.

Jumping from shelter to shelter, Tow sees a determined Amanda begin building a legal case against both the city and the towing company responsible for impounding her car. Once dismissed by the system at large, she finally begins making some headway in her case and gaining respect from those around her, opening the door for more to break out from the rigged system. But the hurdles remain steep: The towing company is sticking her with a $21,634 bill to get her car back after selling it at an auction for less than $200.

Amanda is a truly tenacious character in a way that, mostly, makes her journey an engaging one to follow.

Reuniting Byrne with Physical director Stephanie Laing, Tow plays with many of the iconic elements that make up the underdog legal drama genre, which is both to the film’s benefit and detriment. The idea of a woman with no stationary home, no money, and no law degree choosing to stand up to a company, be it a corporate behemoth or something more modest like the towing company that Amanda fights, is hard not to root for, especially given the way the film presents its central figure. Amanda is a truly tenacious character in a way that makes her journey (mostly) an engaging one to follow. Even without understanding every bit of legal jargon, she proves intelligent in other ways and rarely lets rejection deter her from her goals.

That is, until just after the film’s halfway point, which is where Tow starts to feel a little too generic. From a break in her sobriety to her daughter putting a pause in their already-strained relationship after learning of her lies, the movie creates very basic emotional hurdles for Amanda to overcome. It also doesn’t help much that many of the characters surrounding her fail to have any sort of dimensionality that might make them feel like worthwhile pieces of the wider puzzle. Corbin Bernsen’s Martin La Rosa might as well have been chomping on a cigar as the tow truck company’s lawyer working against Amanda, while Elsie Fisher’s Avery fails to feel anything more than an average moody teenager.

That’s not necessarily to say the cast’s performances are bad. Fisher at least plays the quirkier elements of her character well, while The Holdovers‘ Dominic Sessa captures the determined heart of Kevin, Amanda’s young lawyer, well. Octavia Spencer as strict-yet-caring shelter manager Barb and Ariana DeBose as the wild card shelter resident, Nova, are likewise capably performed.

But none truly hold a candle to Byrne’s electric lead performance as Amanda in Tow. As easy as it could have been to make her either overly dramatic or too closed-off, the Oscar nominee finds a remarkable middle ground between each end of the spectrum, really helping ground Amanda and her fight. It’s also a performance that shows a great understanding and respect of both her real-life inspiration and those in similar situations.

It’s just such a shame that Tow seems so content to coast on Byrne’s talent and the generally touching core of its true story. Its depictions of the unhoused occasionally feel too surface-level, and its use of underdog tropes undermines some of its more meaningful commentary about flaws in the public system for those in Amanda’s situation. But, at the very least, those wanting to see a broadly heartwarming tale of resilience can turn to this one for a fairly diverting time.

Tow hits theaters on March 20.