Buffalo, New York, is not a city of second chances — it is a city where first chances arrive with a price tag attached. Tanya Wexler’s Buffaloed (2020) opens inside this economic logic and never pretends it is anywhere else. Peg Dahl, played by Zoey Deutch with absolute velocity, grew up inside that trap — and the film’s argument is that the only way out is through the trap itself.

The narrative turns on a moment that will be recognizable to anyone who has ever been priced out of aspiration. Peg receives the acceptance letter from Penn, then gets the bill. What she does next is where Buffaloed earns its credentials: instead of a redemption arc, Wexler and screenwriter Brian Sacca build a portrait of someone who becomes genuinely excellent at something morally complicated. Debt collection, in this film, is not a stepping stone to a better life — it is the mirror image of the Ivy League’s own extractive economics.

Deutch’s performance is the reason to see this. She plays Peg at full speed, never stopping to make her sympathetic — and the film is better for it. There is a sequence in the second act where Peg negotiates simultaneously via three phones while outrunning a physical altercation; it is the kind of moment that appears effortless on screen and is technically extraordinary in execution. Judy Greer, as the rival debt collector Wizz, matches her with a performance that refuses to be a foil and instead builds its own coherent interior logic.

Where Buffaloed justifies its score rather than its hype is in the discipline of its world-building. The Buffalo setting — cold, architecturally depressed, stubbornly working-class — is photographed without tourism. This is a city where the cracks in the pavement are structural and the options for someone like Peg are genuinely narrow. The film does not romanticize her choices, and it does not moralize about them. That restraint is Wexler’s best directorial decision.

Buffaloed disappeared into the early-2020 noise with far fewer viewers than it deserved. The calculus is simple: a comedian delivering a career-defining performance in a tightly constructed film that uses genre to argue about class. Zoey Deutch has not stopped working since, but this is the performance that proved what she is capable of. Score: 7.0.