Early one morning, a single father and widower (John Magaro)––credited as Dad––wakes up his perceptive nine-year-old Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and mischievous six-year-old Charlie (Wyatt Solis) and asks them to pack a suitcase as quickly as they can. Everyone is a bit groggy, but they load the car (including their golden retriever Rex) just as a police officer comes to staple an eviction notice on the front door. With a running push in neutral (a familiar routine), Dad and Ella get his clunker revved and started, and soon they’re on their way. Where are they going? The kids––and we––are left to figure that out.
Quiet and heartbreaking, if not slightly conventional, Omaha unfolds like a slow-burning mystery, mostly taking Ella’s skeptical, worried perspective as she tries piecing together clues about this unexpected family road trip. Soon things come into sharper, painful focus. Escaping from their Utah home, they whiz past John McCain presidential signs, purchase Lunchables using food stamps, and enjoy a CD mix of mom’s favorite songs. It’s not long before Dad explains they’re traveling to Nebraska, but director Cole Webley, in his feature debut, doesn’t tip his hand about any more specifics. It doesn’t seem like Dad knows them either.
The screenplay from Robert Machoian is spare, which makes Magaro the right kind of actor for this road trip. Until recently (specifically September 5, which grants him a heavier spotlight and more dialogue) Magaro has mostly portrayed a silent stoicism, injecting weary kindness in the wilderness of First Cow or as a marginalized husband in Past Lives. Here he spends the majority of time internally processing his financial situation and life choices in the driver’s seat or making distressed payphone calls to someone that Webley doesn’t let us hear. There might not be anyone in movies better at expressing a cocktail of sadness, shame, and helplessness and serving it behind the slightest of smiles. It’s as though Dad knows what he’s about to do and can’t do anything to stop it.
That sense of murky inevitability gets heavier the longer their trip continues. But it doesn’t work without the kids’ performances. The hard part about being nine is that you’re capable of sensing when things don’t seem right and young enough not to have any control over it. It’s a conflict that Wright captures in such natural, expressive ways––a testament to her chemistry with Magaro, who trades concerned stares and outbursts with her as things appear more dire or confusing. You suspect they’ve been doing this (pushing their car, eating ice cream together, checking in on each other) her entire life, making this abrupt departure all the more distressing. It’s also a credit to Webley that he found someone in Solis who could operate as the right shade of naive, backseat baby brother, unaware that this trip into middle America might not be just a chance to steal gas station toy cars.
Road movies have familiar beats, and Webley can’t resist employing the familiar amplitude of traumatic moments interspersed with hopeful, lyrical music (which score underwater shots of Ella swimming in a low-rate motel pool) and wide shots of the flat, neverending horizons that consume their small car and make you wonder how many others on the highway may be struggling with something similar. Occasionally he lands on some indelible imagery, static frames––like one in which the kids fly a kite out in the salt flats––that look like photographs, snapshots of ethereal memories drifting away as though portending their eventual reality.
With each passing moment one senses that Dad is wary of providing and capturing as many memories like this as he can––even if that means stopping on the side of the road for a pee break and letting Ella and Charlie dance on the car’s hood. That’s what motivates a late trip to the zoo, his kid’s wide-eyed joy justifying a wallet-emptying ticket purchase. Webley uses every detoured moment as a chance to illustrate how special these ordinary experiences might be while functioning like the prelude to a life-shattering event.
After a moving, assuring cameo from Talia Balsam, the movie ends with a title card, and it’s a sobering explanation for everything we’ve just witnessed. I’m not sure it needed to be there; it turns this living, breathing, dispiriting portrait into something of a statistic. Yet it’s a harsh reminder that this small, intimate story filled with empathy and compassion wasn’t (and isn’t) as unique as you would have hoped.
Omaha premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.