Tribeca 2022: Next Exit Review

This will be one of several reviews from this year’s Tribeca film Festival. To follow our coverage, click here.

Another Tribeca film, another road trip drama dealing with the meaning of life though a much different film than Don’t Make Me Go. The question of where we go when we die is one of the big questions that has loomed over the human race for centuries. Maybe there’s an afterlife or maybe there’s just nothing. Great films force audiences to ask big questions and Next Exit will certainly start a conversation. Instead of approaching those themes , the film is instead an adjacent character piece of initial opposites forced to confront the big questions together over the course of an aforementioned road trip. But the real drama is how their troubled backstories shaped how they got to where they were and how their shared experiences continued to shape them. Leading the way Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli as a pair of unlikely road trip companions.

Next Exit follows Rose (Parker) and Teddy (Kohli), two people who found themselves sharing a car and embarking on a road trip to volunteer for a program by Dr. Stevensen (Gillan), a scientist who had developed the ability to track people into the afterlife thus opening the door on the question of where we go after we die. Rose and Teddy saw the program as a means for them to find meaning and a purpose when it seemed like there wasn’t any left. Each had their own motivations behind participating in the study, their subsequent trip saw the opposites unsurprisingly come together as they opened up to one another and lived what they believed to be the rest of their lives to their fullest while they still could. While those backstories could have been explored more, Rose and Teddy were a blast to watch together. As they finally got to live, feelings started to enter the conversation. The only question was whether or not these feelings they may or may not have for one another affect their relationship.

The best part of Next Exit was the performances from Parker and Kohli as Rose and Teddy and their great chemistry. Their arc was a predictable one for the most part but they played off of each other so well and made it so easy to care about and relate to their characters despite what they intended to do, pulling out more depth than what was arguably there.

At the end of the day, Next Exit is ambitious sci-fi that perhaps doesn’t go far enough with the big ideas but still works as a character piece.

still courtesy of Tribeca

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.