James Y. Lee
American class consciousness has likely never seen a more potent high than our current, dire hour in 2025: the result of billionaires unabashedly dominating our political and economic systems for every inch they can meaningfully consume, flagrantly displaying contempt for the struggles of the lower classes via oppressive policies, incoherent social media rants, and so on. Almost as a direct response, the onset of media specifically dealing with and deconstructing privilege has never been higher, taking the form of either lambasting satires of the rich, or grounded dramas depicting the lower classes’ toils against a system designed to drive them further into poverty. As such, it’s probably an inevitability that the independent film scene was bound to find a way to make crowdpleasers out of those toils.
That’s not to say that Stephanie Laing’s film, Tow—which handily falls under this label—is any less entertaining or well-intentioned an experience for it, instead functioning as a mirror image of the poverty-misery-porn stereotype these kinds of films often fall into. It’s easily describable as a decently grounded, charmingly presented adaptation of a true story about an unhoused woman’s attempts to reclaim her stolen and wrongfully towed car—and its considerable ensemble cast is one of the film’s anchors, allowing it to be a consistent source of entertainment throughout. With virtually every second of its construction, you can pretty clearly discern the spirit for justice that went behind its creation, one where the filmmakers and actors were driven by a desire to tell this David-and-Goliath tale of someone persevering against virtually insurmountable corporate and economic odds. But something about its relatively anodyne construction consistently and quietly undercuts the more bitter, angry edge that a film like this could have truly possessed.
Amanda Ogle—charmingly portrayed by Rose Byrne, tasked with carrying the narrative momentum for most of this film—is an unhoused woman in Seattle living exclusively out of her car. She’s separated from her only daughter, Avery (Eighth Grade‘s Elsie Fisher), consistently lying to her about the dire economic straits she’s found herself in, and actively searching for employment in the veterinary field without a college degree, all while suffering from an extensive history of alcoholism. Her academic absence is what stops all but one of the veterinary services Amanda visits from hiring her, and the one that is interested in hiring her does so on the grounds that she does pickup duty for the animals they bring in. It seems a perfect fit for the fact that Amanda’s car makes up such a significant portion of her life—until the flip side of that particular coin comes crashing down upon her when she comes into the parking lot to find that it’s been stolen.
The car soon reemerges in the possession of one Kaplan Towing Company, placed in an impound lot where one of its employees, Cliff (Red Rocket‘s Simon Rex), tells her that she can’t get it back until she pays the hundreds of dollars needed to reclaim it from the impound lot—infuriating an indignant Amanda, who neither has that money nor was even remotely responsible for the car’s towing circumstances. Thus begins a years-long legal battle, in which Amanda journeys through a community of unhoused people in a shelter run by Barb (Octavia Spencer)—who welcomes women in on a strict condition of sobriety—and is also forced to combat oppressive bureaucratic departments with the help of a snappy young lawyer, Kevin Eggers (Dominic Sessa), to reclaim the car that makes up the bedrock of both her life and employment prospects.
Tow clearly presents itself as a message-based plea for encouragement and empathy towards unhoused people, rather than similar and more dourly inclined films of its ilk that instead elect to incite unproductive levels of pity for the misery these people often experience. Part of that is why it’s a relatively easygoing experience as a film—even as Amanda goes through trial after trial as the towing company throws every fee and legal hurdle they have in the book at her, Tow almost refuses to lose sight of Amanda’s perseverance, as well as the tenacity of the people around her willing to support her, or those who have good intentions of their own that often clash with hers. Tonally speaking, there’s plenty of moments of humor here to go around, and even as the film makes clear how dire things get for her situation on virtually every turn—each legal proceeding she and Kevin send against Kaplan is met with counteractive legal measures and open mockery—one never really gets the sense that she’s going to lose this fight if she plays her cards right and holds on long enough.
As a result, it’s likely of no real surprise to anyone watching the film that the real-life Amanda Ogle (who also executive produced the film) triumphed in her case, beating out the cumulative $21,634 that the real-life towing company involved in the case cumulatively threw at her as a result of compounding possession and legal fees. But there’s a degree to which making that triumph feel like a foregone conclusion, specifically through this film’s adaptation of those events, undercuts the genuine bite that a tale like this could have possessed in regards to how classism sends people into cycles of poverty.
The towing company’s head honcho, portrayed by Corbin Bernsen, is shown to be nothing short of a one-dimensional monster. Formal gestures like some strange inclusions of the soundtrack and unnecessary voice-overs for things like text messages take the weight off of serious moments. The casting, while solid all-around and full of recognizeable names, can often be distracting with moments like Demi Lovato’s character, Nova, bursting into song at a holiday gathering with nothing short of literal popstar vocal talent, or the fact that most of them generally appear a little too well-decorated and made up for their dire economic status. Even the hearing and trial that this film culminates in hilariously proceeds with barely any of the realistic decorum both expected and enforced in courtrooms. These things build up over time, and it makes for a disappointing experience when moments like Rose threatening to be estranged from Avery, or Kevin being confronted with how his relatively green status in the legal field could be exploited, don’t hit as hard as they should for a situation that, had it unfolded any differently, would have been much bleaker in terms of its life-and-death stakes.
Is Tow the kind of film we may need in a current economic situation where the evils of the wealthy are manifesting in more obvious ways, and more and more people falling under their whims need encouragement now more than ever? Perhaps. But a film like this can serve both as a crowdpleaser and a genuine plea for empathy towards the lower classes while also having more to say about how they get trapped in actively exploitative bureaucratic systems, as well as the ways that those systems intersect in complex ways beyond simple moral lines drawn by notions of law and order. It’s hard not to appreciate a film about poverty that explicitly defies the notions of trauma porn that this subgenre of indie class drama often falls into. But Tow also manages to fall somewhat close to the other end of that extreme; so focused on perseverance, victory, and empathy that it dulls the edge on some real thorns it could have picked.
