Hot Water (2026)
I am a sucker for a good road trip movie, I really am, so I went into Ramzi Bashour's Hot Water at the BFI London Film Festival hoping to be swept along. It has a lovely premise and a genuinely winning supporting turn, but in the end it stays stubbornly on the surface, and I came out a little deflated. Two and a half stars.
The setup is promising. A troubled Lebanese-American teenager who keeps getting into fights is shipped off to live with his father, driven cross-country by his mother, a particular, highly strung woman who is trying to quit smoking and quietly fretting about her own ailing mother far away. Punishment is meant to be the whole point of the trip, and the film frames it as the sort of enforced closeness that should crack two difficult people open on the long road west.
The trouble is that it never really does crack them open. For a two-hander built entirely on a mother and son stuck in a car together, Hot Water is oddly reluctant to dig into their relationship, to let them properly challenge or wound or change one another. Instead it proceeds as a string of episodes, this happens, then this, then this, pleasant enough encounters strung along the highway that rarely add up to anything deeper. You keep waiting for the scene that will tip it from amiable to affecting, and it never quite arrives.
What does light the film up is Dale Dickey, whom I have adored ever since she turned up as Patty on My Name Is Earl. Here she is the clear highlight, an eccentric, earthy, deeply lovable soul who feels almost like a Tom Bombadil figure wandered in from a warmer, stranger film, in tune with the land and entirely herself. Every moment she is on screen the whole thing lifts, and you rather wish the road would simply park outside her place for the rest of the runtime. Lubna Azabal and Daniel Zolghadri are perfectly decent as the mother and son, but it is Dickey you remember.
Two and a half stars. When the credits rolled my honest reaction was a slightly bemused "oh, is that it?", the feeling of a film that had all the ingredients for a touching road movie and then declined to cook them. There is warmth here, a strong premise and one genuinely special performance, and I did not dislike my time with it. I just wanted it to go somewhere, to risk something, and it mostly coasts pleasantly to a stop.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More comedy: Lady (2026), Flies (2026), Please (2026)
