A storm is forecast for Orcas Island, and by nightfall it has arrived. Hannah’s young daughter Vee is taken from her home, and the mother runs to the one person within reach: her reclusive neighbour and landlord, Lou. That is the whole engine of Anna Foerster’s Lou. Two women who hardly know each other leave together into the dark to chase a kidnapper, and each carries something she would rather not discuss. The setup is lean and old-fashioned, and for the first half hour that suits it well.

Allison Janney is the reason to watch. Lou lives alone with her dog, keeps to herself, and has the weathered look of someone who stopped expecting company long ago. Janney plays her with very little decoration. She doesn’t ask for sympathy, and when the film begins to show what Lou used to do for a living, the surprise lands because the actress has been so plain about everything else. A woman who looks like she can barely manage the walk to the village turns out to have spent years as a CIA field agent, and Janney lets that change arrive in small adjustments of posture and tone rather than in a speech. It is a controlled, physical piece of work, and it carries more of the film than the script gives it any right to expect.

Jurnee Smollett-Bell has the harder assignment. A frightened mother searching for her child is a role that invites one note, played loudly, and she mostly avoids that trap. Hannah is scared, but she is also stubborn and practical, and the performance keeps those qualities in view even when the dialogue does not. The pairing works because the two actresses have opposite rhythms: Janney is dry and economical, Smollett-Bell raw and quick. When they argue about whether to trust each other, the scene has more life than most of the plot around it.

Foerster, whose earlier work includes Underworld: Blood Wars and episodes of Outlander, knows how to stage movement through a hostile landscape. The island setting and the weather give the pursuit a clear physical shape, and the film is at its best when it simply lets the two women move through the night with a deadline pressing on them. The rain is not decoration. It slows them down, hides the kidnapper and keeps the rest of the world at a distance, which is exactly what a story like this needs. The action is competent rather than inventive, though, and nothing in it will stay with you the way the lead performance does.

The trouble is the writing. Lou wants to be two things at once: a chase thriller and a story about buried history, and it never quite finds the seam between them. Secrets about the past arrive in bursts, usually when the plot needs a push, and they are explained faster than they are felt. Hannah and Lou are meant to be changed by what they learn about each other, but the screenplay hurries through the very scenes where that change should be earned. We are told the stakes are personal long before we are made to believe it. The film asks the viewer for a good deal of goodwill, and that goodwill is spent faster than it is replenished.

Some of the supporting material fares better than the central revelations. Matt Craven’s sheriff, a quiet local who seems to know more about Lou than he lets on, brings a little warmth and a sense that the island is a real community rather than an empty backdrop. Ridley Asha Bateman has little to do beyond being the child at the centre of the panic, which is a limit of the script, not of the young actress. The villainy is the weakest part: the antagonist is menacing in outline and thin in detail, and the film seems more interested in what he reveals about Lou than in who he is.

The final stretch moves with more urgency, and a lighthouse gives the climax a striking place to happen. Yet the emotional payoff is smaller than the noise around it. The confrontation that the whole story has been heading toward feels rushed, as if the film were running out of time, and the closing moments leave a faint sense of questions left hanging rather than deliberately open.

The film’s reception in September 2022 was mixed, and it is easy to see why. Viewers came away admiring Janney and frustrated by the script, and I share both reactions. There is real craft in the performances and in the way the weather is used, and there is real carelessness in how the story handles its own big moments.

What remains is a modest, serviceable thriller carried by its lead. It will not change anyone’s view of the genre, and it never pretends otherwise. But if you want to watch Janney spend ninety minutes quietly dismantling the idea of what a woman her age can do on screen, Lou delivers that, and the rest is a decent excuse for a stormy night.