New Money is a 2019 crime thriller about a struggling pet store worker who kidnaps her estranged father after he cuts her out of his will.
Back in 1972, Liza Minnelli sang how money makes the world go ’round in the hit musical Cabaret and oh how true it is, with cold hard cash the crux of myriad movies before and since. In writer and director Jason B. Kohl‘s feature length debut New Money, it comes ’round again in a troubling story of plans gone wrong, the independent film well made and often deeply authentic as it tracks the breakdown of a woman slowly falling into collapse.
Debbie Tinsdale (Louisa Krause) is barely keeping things together, having dropped out of nursing school after becoming addicted to opiods. She works where she can and drives a car with an automatic engine shut off if she misses a payment. Her father Boyd (Chelcie Ross) however is extremely wealthy, a successful businessman now married to former beauty queen Rose (Robin Weigert) but slowly slipping into the abyss of dementia. He’s promised Debbie fifty-thousand dollars if she reached thirty-years-old sober and not knocked up. Thing is, with Rose looking to keep Debbie out of the money, she convinces Boyd to drop his daughter from the will. Desperate, Debbie, with the unfortunate timing of her equally-addicted boyfriend Steve (Brendan Sexton III) in tow, kidnap Boyd to his expansive summer home, forcing Rose to hire a private investigator (Tom Wopat) to hunt them down. Things do not go well.
Like any in the genre, it’s all about how many steps deep can these people fall into their own mess before slipping right into total chaos that makes it entertaining. Kohl knows well which roots he’s pulling from in developing the madness, making Debbie and Steve just eccentric enough to seem clueless yet at the same time undeniably real. Debbie is a good person but corrupted by her need for a high, thinking that big money will actually be a clean slate rather than the shovel to dig deeper, something we know it most probably will be. Not that she needs money to start the hole.
While New Money is not a big production and may be absent of some of the polish of a big studio release, there is a comedic darkness to it that finds its footing early on, keeping this in good company. Kohl has a limited cast but isn’t afraid to give them some well-defined corners and the time (often in silence) to make sure we see the seediness in all of them. We know who the good guys are supposed to be but the movie makes it clear that no one is really on the up and up. A crop of sturdy performances, led especially by the women with both Krause and Weigert pulling most of the weight, make it click and a nod should be given to longtime character actor Ross for his brief but affecting turn as the dementia-riddled father.
However, while that’s all good, what it does often lack is a sense of irony and a decent score to give it some edge, the movie sometimes drifting because it has little to set the pace or rhythm. Every scene drips with potential but with barely a note of music to layer it in suspense or giddy black humor, it often feels incomplete. No matter, by the time it gets to its third act, you’ll be well caught up in the messy entanglements of these folks anyway, the inevitable collision of the lot more than satisfying as violence begets vigilance. Money may indeed make the world go ’round but as it more often does, spins it off its axis and hurls those caught up in it into oblivion.