Which The Weight Character Are You?

Learn More About The Weight

The Weight is the gritty new survival thriller from director Padraic McKinley, starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe in a story that trades slick genre thrills for something rawer and more grounded. Set in 1930s Oregon, the film follows Samuel Murphy, a recently incarcerated widower played by Hawke, who has been separated from his young daughter Penny. When Warden Clancy, played by Crowe, offers Samuel and a group of fellow prisoners a shot at freedom in exchange for participating in a dangerous gold smuggling operation, Samuel is forced to weigh an impossible choice: risk everything for a chance to see his daughter again, or stay put and lose her anyway.

The film leans into a distinctly old-school prestige-drama register, with both Hawke and Crowe delivering performances that critics have singled out even in otherwise mixed reviews of the overall film. Julia Jones plays Anna, a headstrong Indigenous runaway who joins Samuel and the other prisoners on their journey and refuses to be treated as anyone's afterthought. Austin Amelio and Avi Nash round out the group as Rankin and Singh, two fellow inmates whose very different temperaments, one volatile and reactive, the other steady and dependable, add friction and texture to the ensemble as the journey wears on.

Reviews have been split on whether the film's deliberate pacing serves its story, with some critics calling it a drag despite strong central performances, while others have praised its commitment to a slower, more meditative approach to the survival-thriller genre. What most reviews agree on is that the period setting, an economically depressed, morally compromised 1930s Oregon, is rendered with real specificity, giving the film a grounded sense of place that elevates even its slower stretches.

At its core, The Weight is less interested in the mechanics of a gold heist than in what desperation does to people forced into impossible choices. Samuel's arc in particular hinges on the tension between his desire to do right by his daughter and the increasingly compromising choices that goal demands of him, a theme the film returns to again and again as the smuggling operation grows more dangerous.

Whether you're drawn in by the Hawke-Crowe pairing or the film's bleak period setting, this quiz will sort you into the character whose survival instincts most closely match your own.

If you're drawn to gritty, star-powered dramas built around desperate men making compromising choices under economic pressure, our Landman quiz covers another recent standout in that same vein, trading Depression-era Oregon for the modern-day Texas oil patch.

Hawke and Crowe have each built long careers on exactly this kind of morally complicated, character-driven material, and The Weight gives both actors room to work against type in different ways. Hawke, often cast as introspective or artistic figures, plays a man defined almost entirely by physical desperation and fatherly devotion, while Crowe brings a controlled, quietly menacing authority to Warden Clancy that recalls some of his most memorable earlier work without ever feeling like a retread.