Movies rarely come more generic than French-Canadian filmmaker Maxime Giroux’s “In Cold Light,” an exhaustingly paced action-thriller where every idea and visual seems templated and stylized within an inch of their life. It’s something closer to a mood-board assortment than a film with a real story to tell. A stockpile of neon lights, derelict spaces, gritty town exteriors and an on-the-run anti-heroine (Maika Monroe) caught in a web of drug lords can only sustain one’s attention for only so long.
That’s too bad, as Monroe, the renowned scream queen of excellent genre entries like “It Follows” and “Watcher,” is always an enthralling watch pit against sinister pursuers. She brings her signature qualities — a silent emotional forte, a stoic sense of gracefulness — to the psychically demanding “In Cold Light.” But while a very muscular Monroe gives the cat-and-mouse game her character is forced into her all (and wears her intensifying wounds and blood-soaked fatigue realistically), the film shortchanges the actor with a paper-thin character and an undercooked script (written by Patrick Whistler) that just spins its wheels around various distant influences like “Sicario” and “Drive”.
Monroe plays Ava, introduced to the audience in the film’s mildly impressive opening set piece that unfolds across a drug deal gone violently bad. Ava runs for her life across dusty and industrial landscapes, but gets captured and spends two years in prison. The sentence’s conditional conclusion gives “In Cold Light” its earnest start. In one scene, a parole officer challenges Ava’s ambition to be free and alone, claiming that those are two contradictory desires. But to Ava, they aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they are one and the same.
But Ava is destined to have neither: a reality “In Cold Light” quickly establishes after Ava’s brief time working with her ex-rodeo-star father Will (“CODA” Oscar winner Troy Kotsur) at his stables. The two have some nonspecific father-daughter issues escalated by Ava’s time behind bars, and the family’s troubles only grow when Ava attempts to get back to her old ways in the drug world. But when she witnesses the murder of her well-meaning twin brother Tom (Jesse Irving) during another deal gone bad, she gets framed for the crime by a corrupt police force. What else could she do if not run from those vilifying her in the eyes of everyone, including her dad? Will seems naively unaware of Tom’s own involvement in the drug trades. A sensitive and naturally captivating performer, Kotsur occasionally unearths something touching in Will as an aging man who should’ve been dealt a better hand in life. But the story doesn’t give the actor that much to build on.
There isn’t a lot that happens to Ava while on the run and “In Cold Light” increasingly tests one’s patience through its insistence on not deepening any situation or character. One decent exception is when Ava gets stuck with Tom’s orphaned baby and must hide him. These scenes freshen up the story with a welcome layer of humanity and calls upon our own genuine concern and goodwill. An inspired instance when Ava changes the little one’s diaper in the aisles of a supermarket especially works well, and hints at the richer movie “In Cold Light” could have been with more specific, character-based moments like it.
But elsewhere, this broad neo-noir exercise often aggressively sells a fast-paced and real-time experience, almost fishing for bland praises of the “edge-of-your-seat” and “pulse-pounding” variety. It would have been one thing if the film actually delivered on these promises, but despite all the visual and thematic efforts, the fizzling stakes never seem high enough. That might have something to do with the fact that we don’t really get enough reasons to care about any of the film’s characters, no matter how often the generically dilapidated design details and redundant synth score try to convince us that we’re witnessing some exciting, dangerous stuff.
The film’s final mystifying decision arrives when Ava meets the brains of the operation — a crime boss named Claire, played by a sadly miscast and painfully underutilized Helen Hunt (another Oscar winner “In Cold Light” doesn’t do any favors to). The two women discuss the situation on hand and cut a deal, the specifics of which neither make sense nor matter in any tangible way. The conclusion that brings Ava’s story full circle feels similarly out of place. Again, this is a film that is less concerned with earned details, and more after selling a vibe. And after a tiresome 90 minutes and change, the vibes just seem off.