9 Bullets is the small-town road thriller where Lena Headey runs from Sam Worthington

A burlesque dancer turned reluctant guardian, a boy who saw too much, and a crime boss with a long memory: Gigi Gaston’s 2022 thriller pares the genre down to the chase itself.

9 Bullets is a 2022 American thriller written and directed by Gigi Gaston, with Lena Headey and Sam Worthington carrying the two sides of a small, contained chase movie. The setup is familiar — a woman with a past, a child she did not plan to be responsible for, a man who wants the child dead — and the film commits to that familiarity rather than dressing it up.

Headey plays a former burlesque dancer turned author who has spent years trying to leave behind the man whose money once paid her rent. He is the local crime boss (Worthington), and when his crew kills a neighbouring family in front of their son (Dean Scott Vazquez), she packs what she can carry and gets the boy out of town before he can be finished off as a witness.

Gaston wrote and directed the film and shot it in California inside the pandemic production window, and the look reflects that: long stretches of desert highway, motel parking lots, kitchens pretending to be living rooms. The pace is steadier than the title suggests; the chase is more emotional than kinetic.

Whatever the script is doing, Headey is the engine. She plays the character with the kind of slightly worn calm that suggests fear has been the weather for years now, and the moments when she has to be tender with the boy land because she sells the cost of them. Worthington, working in a flat-affect register, is convincingly menacing without resorting to theatre.

Vazquez, the youngest of the leads, has the trickiest job — the witness boy is a role that goes wrong easily — and he keeps it grounded. The cinematography reads more functional than expressive, with daylight desert palettes and clean compositions; the score stays out of the way and lets the long road shots do their own work.

What 9 Bullets does not try to be is more than it is. It is a small movie about people who already know how their fight ends, taking each other from one motel parking lot to the next. Whether that holds the attention depends on the viewer’s appetite for thrillers that travel rather than escalate; for that mode, Headey alone is reason enough.

Tags: Lena Headey, action thriller