Into the Ashes is a 2019 thriller about a man with an honest job and a loving wife, who believed he had safely escaped his violent, criminal history, only to find it come back with a vengeance.
I’m drawn to the gritty, raw, urgency of movies like director Aaron Harvey‘s latest Into The Ashes, a whole series of films like it that might not be cinematic marvels but are sort of appealing on a baser level. Loads of hair-trigger violence, seething familial conflicts, seedy sex and more. These are pulpy good times that in the right hands can be genuinely entertaining, if not downright moving. Think of the titles like Out Of The Furnace or Blue Ruin and you get where I’m going. This isn’t quite on the same level but still manages to make its mark with a few tightly wound performances and good direction.
Nick Brenner (Nick Grimes) is a man with a past but dutifully tries to keep it at bay, finding love and happiness with his wife Tara (Marguerite Moreau) while laying low in a furniture repair store. He’s made friends with Sal (James Badge Dale) and the two head to the woods to work on a cabin for the owner of the local tavern, using the weeked to get in a little hunting. They bond, letting down their guards in tales of comfort, women, and more. Nick at last feels free of his haunts, though not for long. Returning home, he discovers Tara has been ruthlessly killed by a thug named Sloan (Frank Grillo), fresh out of prison and on the hunt for cash he left with Nick. Stripped of every reason to stay alive, Nick goes on a tear, his father in law Sheriff Frank Taylor (Robert Taylor) struggling to deal with his daughter’s death but trying to keep Nick from falling into the abyss.
Like any in the genre, there is patience in the setup, the routines of a borrowed life crucial in establishing the need for normality when chaos lurks just beyond the shadows. Harvey mostly does this well, the small town good ol’ boy look and feel effective in creating a sense of time and place, building tension out of the simmering dread that paints every corner of Nick’s life. That dread takes form in Sloan, who rides into town with blunt force and cracks the seam wide open, steering the story into real darkness. There are bumps in that delivery but there’s also commitment from the cast and it makes a difference.
None of what happens is all that hard to figure out, Sloan and his two cronies Charlie (David Cade) and Bruce (Scott Peat) filling in the trope-ish molds of fairly typical bad guys we’ve seen in flicks like this before, though Grillo is an intimidating figure who maybe isn’t straying too far from the expected but does this part with plenty of gruff. That said, you might think this a bountiful box of beat ’em ups and gun fights, and while there is that, this tends to take a more cerebral route, mostly, with some extended sequences that anchor more to the dialogue than the action. Unfortunately, that’s not always the right choice, but when you’ve got tinder boxes like Grillo and the growling Taylor behind those words, it tends to work, though it’s too bad the women in all this are more substantive, more props to motivate than anything with meaning. Into the Ashes might not trust its audience all that much, but it knows what it wants to be and settles right into the groove in being so.