Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Bill Baker, an American oil-rig roughneck from Oklahoma, travels to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter, Allison, who is in prison for a murder she claims she did not commit. Confronted with language barriers, cultural differences, and a complicated legal system, Bill builds a new life for himself in France as he makes it his personal mission to exonerate his daughter.
Stillwater benefits enormously from Matt Damon's committed, nuanced performance as the laconic Oklahoma roughneck navigating an alien world, which elevates material that is otherwise uneven. The fish-out-of-water drama in Marseille is textured and the father-daughter dynamic is emotionally genuine, but the plot meanders considerably in its middle section and loses thriller momentum. Tom McCarthy's direction is confident and the Marseille locations are well-used, though the cinematography is competent rather than distinctive. The film's premise draws loose inspiration from the Amanda Knox case, giving it a ripped-from-reality edge, but the execution doesn't fully capitalise on its most interesting ideas. The ending is the weakest element — the moral ambiguity collapses into a somewhat unsatisfying and abrupt resolution that feels dramatically incomplete, leaving threads dangling without earned payoff.