You know that documentary about Val Kilmer that came out last year, that career retrospective in the context of his struggles with throat cancer, called Val? Lou is that same movie except about Kilmer’s contemporary, Lou Diamond Phillips.

In a strange choice by director Anna Foerster, though, Lou is played by Allison Janney, and instead of being a Hollywood actor, she’s a survivalist living on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Lou’s living off the land with her dog, shooting deer for their meat, but she also has a tenant (Jurnee Smollett) and her daughter (Ridley Bateman) who pay her rent — and are late on this month’s, she gruffly informs them while driving by in her pickup truck. This may all be moot because we learn early on that Lou is planning to kill herself. She’s got a black tarp set up to catch the spatter from her shotgun, and she’s left a note and some frozen meat and cash for an unknown beneficiary.

The gun is propped up under her chin as the door bursts open in a rainstorm. It’s her tenant, Hannah, whose daughter has just been kidnapped by her unhinged ex and the child’s father, Philip (Logan Marshall-Green). Because the roads are washed out in the storm, he’s trekking through the forest with the girl in tow. Seems like as good a time as any to postpone the suicide.

There’s a certain raw vitality to Lou, a crispness to the imagery, even though most of the images are a muddy brown or green. There’s a point to that colour scheme, from a survival perspective – Lou comments to Hannah at one point that her yellow rain jacket is practically a target on her back. Hannah ditches the jacket right quick, because indeed there are men with weapons out in these woods – not just Philip, but several flunkies who do his bidding.

Where Lou is “less than,” though, is its setup. Being thrust into the story is not a bad thing, but we only learn the broad strokes about these characters before suddenly we’re bushwhacking through wet foliage. More is revealed as the story progresses, but not enough, and there are some pat explanations to various character motivations as we learn more about who everybody is and what secrets they’re hiding. They feel like banal secrets, even as some of them are baroque in nature, and they arrive with a certain inevitability that is the enemy of good drama.

It’s great to see Janney in this sort of role, though. Who knows how she would have played a 1980s Hollywood actor, but as a survivalist, she has the sort of authenticity that makes it seem like she’d tackled a similar character before she got into her 60s. Her hair is a long mane of white, usually bound up into something more practical. When she gets into scrums in this movie, you feel the fierceness, you believe she’d be the one to emerge from them despite the on-paper advantage of her opponents.

The other performances don’t make the same impression. Smollett’s usual charisma seems blunted – perhaps too much time spent soaking wet has dampened some of her tendency to shine. Marshall-Green, who has often played the creepier version of Tom Hardy, is also the blander version of Hardy here. He’s the kind of psycho who seems to be doing things just to manufacture menace, like leaving cryptic postcards for the pair who are pursuing him – though his certainty that they are tracking him perfectly seems a bridge too far, or in other words, a narrative convenience.

There’s a lot to be said for a self-contained little action thriller like Lou, in theory. The theory doesn’t quite hold up to the reality in this particular film. Foerster reveals herself to have skill as a technician, but writers Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley can’t keep pace. Their dialogue lacks nuance, as does their sketching of character. Just imagine what Lou Diamond Phillips would have done with this material.

 

Lou is currently streaming on Netflix.