Roxxy | Film review - Slow-burn love story turns explosive at the end

Love on the run.

Zoë Kravitz and Emile Hirsch play a fate-matched couple in the uneven but striking indie movie Roxxy, (aka Vincent N Roxxy), whose wild swings between slow-burn love story and explosive crime drama will take many viewers off guard.

The pair are thrown together after Hirsch’s scruffy white knight Vincent rescues Kravitz’s punk princess Roxxy from attack, and a tentative romance ensues when she comes to stay at his old family home in small-town Louisiana, which he shares with short-fused brother JC (Emory Cohen) and JC’s bartender girlfriend (Zoey Deutch).

There are cosy interludes at the carnival and an abandoned drive-in. But we know the idyll won’t last. After all, writer-director Gary Michael Schultz has been dropping hints all along about each character’s threatening past. Be warned. It goes all Taxi Driver at the end. Which will be jarring for some but thrillingly right for others.

Certificate 15. Runtime 98 mins. Director Gary Michael Schultz

Available on DVD & Digital from Signature Entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCvxSsNCj-Y

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.