‘Anywhere’ is a Neo-Western Crime Thriller That Goes Nowhere
In Anywhere, there is the foundation of an engaging neo-Western buried somewhere inside Adam Seidel’s film. Rural Oklahoma provides the backdrop, with a brutal act as an opener, and its morally bankrupt characters seem destined for an escalating spiral of stupidly bad decisions. Yet despite possessing all the ingredients of a compelling crime thriller, Anywhere never finds the urgency necessary to transform its premise into something memorable.
The film opens with oil worker John (Joshua Burge) returning home to discover two bus tickets hidden inside his trailer. One for his wife Syd (Hayley McFarland), the other for his brother Cody (Ryan Francis). Realizing they intend to run away together, John confronts Cody, and the argument quickly erupts into violence. Believing he killed his brother, John leaves the body, and Syd swoops in to finish the job. They reconcile and attempt to disappear, only to find themselves pursued by mounting complications, the inquisitive town sheriff Rose Vile (Mary Buss), and an opportunistic landlord Wade (Sean Gunn).
On paper, it’s a great setup. The opening establishes betrayal, and desperation almost immediately, suggesting a tense cat-and-mouse thriller about regular folks trapped by increasingly impossible circumstances. Instead, Anywhere spends much of the movie introducing characters, locations, and disconnected moments without establishing what the larger story is truly about. The result is a film that constantly feels as though it is preparing to begin.
Scenes arrive one after another, new faces enter the narrative, and subplots emerge, yet little of it feels connected by a clear purpose. It isn’t until roughly forty minutes into the film, when the investigation surrounding Cody’s disappearance begins to take true shape, that the audience finally understands the central mystery driving the story. By then, much of the initial momentum vanishes.
The performances don’t do much to compensate. Burge’s John is written as an emotionally passive protagonist who spends much of the film taking a beating rather than driving events. While that passivity may be intentional, it creates a central figure who rarely commands attention. His emotional reserve, combined with dialogue delivered in an almost uniformly flat cadence across every performance, leaves many scenes feeling emotionally distant. Ironically, Hayley McFarland’s Syd emerges as the film’s most exciting character precisely because she refuses to remain passive. While her decisions are not always believable, she consistently acts. She pushes the narrative forward, makes choices, and embraces the moral ambiguity that the screenplay seems hesitant to fully explore elsewhere. Sean Gunn is always fun to see on screen, but he has five minutes of runtime, so it doesn’t affect the story much.
Visually, Anywhere frequently hints at the film it could have been. The lonely highways, open landscapes, oil fields, and isolated towns create an atmosphere reminiscent of modern neo-Westerns and rural crime dramas. The setting naturally evokes stories where violence and desperation feel inevitable, but Seidel never fully capitalizes on that potential. Rather than allowing the environment to become an active participant in the narrative, it remains largely atmospheric decoration.
None of this is to say Anywhere lacks ambition. Seidel clearly has an appreciation for westerns and slow-burn crime cinema and understands how to construct individual moments of tension. The problem is that those moments rarely accumulate into sustained momentum. Instead of building toward an inevitable collision, the film drifts from one episode to the next, leaving its strongest ideas stranded somewhere along the way.
Like its title suggests, Anywhere spends much of its runtime searching for direction. Unfortunately, it never quite arrives.
