Sundance 2025 Review: OMAHA, Poignant Character- and Performance-Driven Family Drama

For the disheveled, unnamed father (John Magaro, September 5, Past Lives, First Cow) in first-time feature-length director Cole Webley and writer Robert Machoian’s (The Killing of Two Lovers) poignant family drama, Omaha, a new dawn brings a new, ominous day.

 

Awakening first his 6-year-old son, Charlie (Wyatt Solis), and then his 9-year-old daughter, Ella (Molly Belle Wright), from slumber, he invokes the promise of a family trip, a chance to re-bond after the unexpected loss of Charlie and Ella’s mother, as well as a downturn in the family’s finances.

 

Before the father – here left unnamed to emphasize his symbolic, everyday dad status – can pack up what’s left of their prized possessions, including the family dog, a well-behaved Golden Retriever, in their beater car, a sheriff’s deputy appears in their driveway. The muted, often unheard conversation needs little explanation: like too many families in economic distress, Charlie, Ella, and their father face eviction from the family home.

 

Rather than stay for the excruciating experience of witnessing the loss of their home, the unnamed father has made a unilateral decision to leave their home on an unnamed residential street in an unnamed city somewhere in the American West for Omaha, Nebraska. What – or rather who – awaits them in Omaha remains a question Webley and Machoian only answer in the final, devastating moments. It retroactively clarifies why the unnamed father specifically chose Nebraska and why he decided to make Omaha the destination for his family.

 

While their peripatetic road trip has an ultimate end in mind, the stops along the way can best be described as casual or incidental, including the obligatory rest stops for food, gas, and lodging. At each stop, however, dwindling resources add a layer of unspoken tension between the family members. Items are left on a supermarket conveyer belt; two kites, one for each child, becomes one kite that the children share when they stop at Utah’s Salt Flats for shared family time and positive memory building, before they inevitably turn negative as the road shortens and Omaha beckons.

 

Webley and Machoian deliberately obscure “when,” exactly, Omaha unfolds, leaving the audience to uncover the clues for themselves, including the make and model of the family car, the lack of contemporary technology (the unnamed father relies on phone booths, cell phones are conspicuously absent, and so forth), and the sense of impending financial doom to underscore both Omaha’s specificity in a recent time and place and just as importantly, its relevance for another economic recession. History teaches us that capitalism turns on boom-and-bust cycles, meaning the next economic downturn might be closer than we imagine.

 

Anchored by a predictably strong, naturalistic turn by Magaro as the unnamed father, a note-perfect, believable turn by Solis as the youngest, slightly clueless member of the family, and an exceptional, heart-rending turn by Wright as the nine-going-on-nineteen Ella, Omaha offers a grounded, intimate look at a family’s potentially last days together. It’s the kind of small, intimate indie film typical of Sundance’s past, present, and hopefully, future.