The Price We Pay (2023)

2 Stars (out of 4)

Buying the Farm

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

This genre-switching thriller likely hopes to entertain with its increasingly bizarre, over-the-top plot turns, but, by the time it gets to the good stuff, we're too frustrated by the dumb stuff.

Grace (Gigi Zumbado) is deeply in debt to a loan shark, and goes to a pawn shop to try and get some money out of a beloved necklace. While she's there, three masked robbers break in. She ducks into a closet, while a shootout starts. In the end, only the criminals, Cody (Stephen Dorff), Alex (Emile Hirsch), and Alex's brother Shane (Tanner Zagarino).

Unfortunately Shane has been shot and their getaway driver has panicked and disappeared. Grace tries to make a break for it, but Cody catches her and holds her hostage. She drives until her car breaks down, and the foursome make their way to a nearby farm to lay low and figure out their next move. Unfortunately, the owners of the farm are running a sinister operation that does not bode well for our robbers.

Directed by the always-interesting Ryuhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train), The Price We Pay has a great, bleak, minimalist look and uses its spaces well. It takes its cues from Quentin Tarantino's screenplays Pulp Fiction and From Dusk Till Dawn, in which clashing characters find themselves up against a common enemy; that common enemy then reveals itself to be far worse than initially imagined.

Unfortunately, The Price We Pay — what a generic title! — never finds a tone that's playful or clever enough to handle the twists. They come across as clumsy, even accidental. Plus, there are just too many instances in which the characters blunder needlessly into danger when staying put would have been smarter (although that way there would have been no movie). It's frankly difficult to forgive them, especially Alex, as played by Hirsch, who once again overacts to the point of smarminess.