Burn is a 2019 thriller about gas station held at gunpoint who finds an opportunity to make a connection with the robber.
Sometimes, all it takes is a particularly quirky character brought to life by a unique performance to make what should be a forgettable movie into something quite the opposite. Such is the case for writer and director Mike Gan‘s debut effort Burn, a strange little gem that is just this side of WTF? held together by a truly unhinged turn from Tilda Cobham-Hervey, who outrights makes everything about this curious oddity one to watch.
As the night shift begins at a corner convenience store gas station, Melinda (Cobham-Hervey) arrives for work. She’s a nebbish, scrawny young woman, desperately lonely, aggressively friendly to the men coming in, trying to make any kind of connection, though holds a barely hidden attraction to Officer Liu (Harry Shum Jr.), who routinely stops by. Her coworker Sheila (Suki Waterhouse), a pretty blonde with a sassy attitude, doesn’t treat Melinda all that well, and with her replacement running late, she’s stuck there, frustrated her night is ruined. In comes Billy (Josh Hutcherson), a jittery young man with a backpack, who waits till the place is empty before he demands from the girls all the money in the store, saying he needs cash to pay off a pack of angry bikers looking to kill him. Melinda, unbalanced as she is, finds herself drawn to the robber, and blatantly tries to help him, thinking he’ll take her with him, but that’s when things get dark, and soon a moment of chaos changes everything.
As a complete package, Burn is rife with missteps, Gan stepping into a few tired trappings of the genre that don’t suit his claustrophobic story all that well, including a hopelessly tired cliché at the start where we see something shocking before zipping back in time to see how it comes to it. That’s a ‘hook’ that never really works and sucks the life out of most of the suspense, which would be totally damning if it weren’t for the work of Cobham-Hervey, who grabs firm hold of the lunacy and runs with it right over the cliff. It’s how she does this that makes the difference, not doing what’s expected, which is a testament to Gan’s solid script, or at least the development of its main character. Either way, she’s a wonder to watch and for every frame she’s in, stone cold riveting.
What we end up with is a bizarre hostage film that goes farther into darker corners the more it opens up, balancing a complex twisted fight for survival with a loose canon struggling to hold onto what’s left of reality. Gan explores a few good ideas along the way, but also trips on a few others as well, occasionally shifting momentum in the wrong direction. Its single setting is a great place to have some fun, and Gan never really loses touch of the black comedy simmering underneath it all. Despite some lulls, Burn is a little powder keg of surprises, with a fiercely committed spin from its star.