A new trailer has arrived for The Weight, a gritty historical survival drama starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe.
Set in 1933 Oregon during the Great Depression, the film follows Samuel Murphy, played by Hawke, a widower torn away from his daughter and sent to a brutal prison camp. His chance at freedom comes from Warden Clancy, played by Crowe, who offers him a dangerous deal: smuggle gold through the remote Oregon wilderness with a group of prisoners, and he may earn his way back to his child.
That setup gives The Weight a strong old-school adventure-thriller shape. This is not a polished heist movie with clever thieves and stylish escapes. It is mud, sweat, prison violence, dangerous terrain and men carrying literal gold through a world where greed can kill as easily as the wilderness.
The title works on two levels. There is the physical weight of the gold itself, dragged through miles of hostile country by desperate men. But there is also the emotional weight Samuel carries: the burden of fatherhood, loss, survival and the question of what a person is willing to endure for love. Hawke has described that emotional burden as central to what drew him to the role.
Russell Crowe’s Warden Clancy appears to function as the film’s corrupt power figure, a man who understands exactly how to exploit prisoners who have almost nothing left to lose. Opposite him, Hawke’s Samuel looks like a man stripped down to instinct, patience and a very dangerous kind of determination.
Directed by Padraic McKinley in his feature debut, The Weight has already screened at Sundance and Berlin, where it was described as a tense survival tale with a strong 1970s action-drama influence. The film also stars Julia Jones, Austin Amelio, Avi Nash and Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen.
For fans of rugged historical dramas, The Weight looks like a hard, physical thriller built around greed, punishment and the raw human need to get back home. It has the shape of a prison escape story, a wilderness survival film and a gold-smuggling crime drama all pressed into one heavy pack.
The Weight opens in U.S. theaters on September 18, 2026.
Video source: ONE Media
