BALLISTIC Review: Mother Undone by Her Son's Battlefield Death

Small-town Ohio life is relentlessly dreary in Ballistic, a downbeat drama set around a munitions factory. Far more complicated than the action genre it's positioned in, the film is a serious account of the crippling effects of vengeance.

Lina Headey stars as Nance Redfield, a single mom who works at a factory that manufactures bullets for the armed services. A swift montage, intercut with the bullet-making process, details the life of her son Jesse (Jordan Kronis) from childhood to his enlistment.

Writer and director Chad Faust takes a minimalist approach to the story, offering very few details but pinning down his working-class milieu perfectly. The dingy streets, broken-down cars, creaky houses, and grey skies feel absolutely right.

So does Nance's workplace, a large warehouse built for dozens of workers, but just barely holding on to a handful of positions. She has an understanding boss (Enrico Colantoni), who's still exploiting her, and a pregnant daughter-in-law Diana (Amybeth McNulty), who is desperate to escape from an abusive stepfather.

Other than that, her life centers around Jesse, seen briefly on a Zoom call before an officer arrives at the door with the news that he's been killed in action.

Nance stumbles through the stages of grief on her own. Faust is careful to point out how sensitively the officers assigned to the case operate. But Nance is too isolated and stubborn to accept help. Not even from a therapy group led by Afghan immigrant Kahlil (Hamza Haq), who seems admirably well-equipped to work with her through her pain.

Diana objects to an autopsy, but Nance insists on finding out how Jesse was killed, even breaking into the morgue to retrieve the fatal shell from his body. It turns out to be a military-issue 5.56 mm, one most likely made in her very factory.

Looking for someone to blame, Nance attacks her boss, smashing his sports car and threatening to blow up the factory's gunpowder cache. She tries to stab the officer who brought the news of Jesse's death, but is caught by security. Then she plots to shoot the sergeant who recruited Jesse.

Driven in part by conspiracy theories she overhears on the radio and internet, Nance is a mass of incoherent rage, someone whose arguments make as little sense as her son's death. It's a searing performance by Headey, containing her rage under wool watch caps and bulky sweaters.

Ballistic is not without humor, especially in caustic exchanges between Nance and Kahlil, an immigrant who knows perfectly well that he will always be viewed as suspect. "I'll buy the ammo for the non-date lessons I'm forcing on you," he quips at one point.

Faust takes some narrative shortcuts, as in scenes set at an out-of-town shooting range. But he always gets the details right: the friendly vet who sells Nance a rifle; the Ziploc bag of M&Ms in Jesse's personal effects; Gonga's Grill, the fast-food joint where the recruiter has lunch.

What's frustrating about Ballistic is that the characters' arguments don't work. The recruiter (played by Faust) blames the Taliban for Jesse's death, which is true up to a point but doesn't explain why we were at war. Nance wants to kill her perceived enemies, but revenge won't end her sorrow. The characters here remain trapped by their mistakes.

Faust may not completely land the ending, but Ballistic is unexpectedly nuanced and consistently engrossing. Faust wrote and directed the equally surprising Girl (2020), a Bella Thorne vehicle that greatly exceeded its B-movie settings. He is a good filmmaker who so far has a strong track record.

The film releases in select movie theaters and On Demand on Friday, April 17, 2026, via Brainstorm Media.