Weird Wednesdays: Freeway

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Them’s some big ugly fucking teeth you got there, Bob!

The thing about films that draw from fairy tales is that you can typically predict the trajectory of the story. The details might be modernized, and it may be imbued with a romantic element, but the standard beats are all there, and the viewer is rarely surprised. That is not at all the case with Freeway, a Grimm tale indeed. To use a high-brow academic term, this movie is bonkers.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the original Little Red Riding Hood folktale, here’s the gist: a young girl is sent through the woods to visit her grandmother, basket full of food in tow. She meets a sketchy wolf who finds out where she’s headed, beats her there, eats Grandma, then eats her. In some versions, she escapes before he gobbles her up; in some, she and Grandma are rescued by a hunter who opens that literal bad boy up and releases them from his belly. In others, there is no happy ending. The story originated in oral storytelling, then was first written by Charles Perrault in 1697. His take is by far the darkest: not only is there no rescue, but Perrault also intended for the story to be an allegory about the danger of sexual predators. 

Director Matthew Bright melds together, then deconstructs, the myriad versions. The wolf, so cleverly named Wolverton, is indeed Perrault’s sexual predator, revealed to be the I-5 killer who’s been stalking, murdering, and defiling the bodies of sex workers along the interstate. Vanessa Lutz (if you’re not sure who she’s representing, check the red basket she takes along when leaving home) does survive, as in the more tame Grimm version (how often do you hear that phrase?). However, Bright strays from previous iterations in absolutely every other sense. 

I should preface by saying that this film needs just about every trigger warning imaginable. Vanessa, played by Reese Witherspoon (in a welcome hard left from her typical sweetheart roles), has a backstory riddled with hardship–she’s illiterate and in a remedial school, her mother Ramona is a sex worker (which isn’t inherently bad, but peddling her services right outside the family home is more than a little uncouth) and her stepfather Larry is sexually abusing her, and they’re both addicts. The dynamic between Vanessa and her mother is best illustrated in their final scene together: Ramona, handcuffed on the couch, is begging for a cigarette. Vanessa insists that the officers give her one, and then sits with her, gently raising the cigarette to her mother’s lips for every drag. It’s nuanced moments like these that elevate Bright’s script from the goofy B-movie it could have easily been. Instead, it’s clear that Bright has done his homework. Freeway is a smart satire that still has all of the fun of a B-movie black comedy; it’s an exploitation film that vindicates the exploited. As Vanessa says, “I’m pissed off and the whole world owes me.”

Rather than fall back into the broken foster system, Vanessa decides to embark on a quest up the highway to Grandmother’s house. She kisses her ill-fated boyfriend Chopper goodbye and sets off in a car stolen from her social worker, red basket in tow. Almost immediately, the car breaks down, but thankfully, she’s rescued by a good Samaritan! Oh, if only. Kiefer Sutherland’s Wolverton is your classic Dateline killer: he seems gentle, generous, and unsettlingly kind. It’s hard to watch him manipulate Vanessa into vulnerability, weaponizing the techniques from his psychology handbook, but our baddie in red catches on quickly. He is, of course, the I-5 killer, and she is just not having it. She instantly turns the tables on him, pulling Chopper’s gun. This is when Vanessa evolves from a protagonist to my personal hero, with lines like “If you try anything, I’m going to shoot you so many times.” And then, to my shock, she does! So many times!

Like I said, this movie surprised me again and again. The film managed to pack countless gasp-inducing moments into 102 minutes, including when it’s revealed that Bob somehow survived and has identified Vanessa as his would-be killer. Things escalate even more from there, with the footholds of a slanderous trial and Vanessa’s rage-fueled outbursts and her tumultuous time in prison (yes, Orange is the new Red). This pivot in the story adds so much depth: Vanessa is wrongfully imprisoned, but our sympathy for her is challenged when she’s up to hijinks like picking fights with her fellow inmates and creating a shiv out of a toothbrush and plastic wrap. Even still, with this darker side of her personality unveiled, we see the same Vanessa: crass, funny, and smarter than anyone gives her credit for. And even when Vanessa executes the breakout, leaving bloody carnage in her wake, I’m still rooting for her as she and Mesquita skip off to the prison van. 

Once we leave prison, Vanessa has evolved into the fully-formed bad girl that she’s meant to be, and Bob is back to the chase with his teeth now permanently baring. While the police finally make their way to the truth (as Vanessa says, the truth is eternal), Vanessa and Bob come closer and closer to their final encounter at Grandma’s house. What happens there, and all of the bonkers moments leading up to it, are for you to experience yourself. 

Again, this is not the Red Riding Hood you know. It’s a violent, thrilling, Lynchian masterpiece, and almost three decades later, it holds up as the most radical take on a fairy tale I’ve ever seen. If you’re a fan of Wild at Heart, or just love watching movies where young women go out and wreck shit (or both, like me) then you need to grab your basket and start making your way through the woods. You may not find Grandma, but you’ll certainly have a good time.