‘Omaha’ Review: John Margaro Will Break Your Heart as a Widowed Dad in Nuanced Family Drama [A] – Sundance Film Festival

One of the most quietly devastating films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is also one of the festival’s sleeper hits. Director Cole Webley’s feature debut, Omaha, is a sensitive and heart wrenching family drama that unfolds on an eastbound road trip at the height of the 2008 economic crisis.

John Magaro (September 5) stars as a newly widowed father who wakes his young children early one morning when they are forced to vacate their home. It is unclear how recently his wife passed away, though some clues — unfinished laundry, vases of dying flowers — suggest the loss is still very fresh. Hurrying to rush the kids out the door, he asks his 9-year-old daughter what she would bring if there was a fire and she had no time to decide. A photo of her mother, a Nintendo DS, and a stack of books are her most important possessions and the only things she can carry with her as they depart.

Molly Belle Wright (The Best Christmas Pageant Ever) is 9-year-old Ella, a typical first born daughter who, as the default lady of the house, shoulders the burden of emotional care for her father and 6-year-old brother Charlie (Wyatt Solis). Loaded into a barely running Honda with their golden retriever Rex, they depart under the sympathetic but duty bound eye of the local sheriff, leaving their home somewhere in the southwest. Dad offers only that they are going to Nebraska, but provides no explanation or plans about what awaits them there.

Magaro delivers an understated yet powerful performance as a desperate, grieving single father at the end of his fraying rope. Along I-80 across Utah and Wyoming, they stop at a McDonald’s Play Place, fly kites on the Bonneville Salt Flats, jump on the beds in a roadside motel. He creates happy moments for his children, but they are always suffused with sadness as the joy never reaches his eyes. Magaro communicates so much with so few words. We feel what he does every time he has to make a decision based on the rapidly dwindling bills in his wallet and in every prayer he utters to his deceased wife. He expresses more with what he doesn’t say than with what he does.

In a film like Omaha, its success hinges on the child actors and their ability to behave like children, but with the sensibilities of someone much older. For Wright, we can see her working things out in her mind, attempting to figure out what her father is up to when he refuses to explain himself. And yet, she is still a child who doesn’t understand the nuances and layers to his moods and choices. When she unbuckles her seatbelt and leans out the window to enjoy the wind on her face, she can’t understand that Dad berating her is not because he’s mad but because he is scared, even though she experiences something similar when Charlie wanders off from her in a gas station. 

Wright and Magaro walk a delicate line together. The relationship between the two feels natural and believable. For the film to work, we have to care about both of them and to understand Dad’s feelings as well as Ella’s. And we do. He isn’t a monster and she isn’t a brat. Wright has a lot to carry and she does. She is quite a find and will surely be very busy for the next couple of years.

As younger brother Charlie, Wyatt Solis is also a gifted young actor. Omaha’s emotional weight falls on Magaro and Wright, but as the older sister, Ella is Charlie’s protector and nearly everything she does is based on an innate need to provide stability for him. Charlie sits quietly in the backseat, playing with his collection of shoplifted gas station toys. He sometimes wonders if Dad is mad at them, but beyond that he doesn’t ask many questions about where they are going or why. Because of Ella’s position as caretaker, he doesn’t have to think about it and is mostly able to just go along for the ride. That’s not to say that Charlie is completely insulated from big, emotional moments. In two key scenes, all three break down and bring the audience with them. With the wrong combination of actors these scenes could have felt overwrought or manipulative. Instead, they are raw and real. 

With a script by Robert Machoian (The Killing of Two Lovers) Webley makes good use of his 83 minutes. There is a surprising intensity that propels the family onward. Without letting us in on what comes at the end of this trip, Webley mingles curiosity with a hint of dread. Any longer and it would have felt like too much. The tight runtime highlights one specific family while telling the larger story of how the economic crisis of the late aughts impacted people in small town America and the impossible choices too many had to make.

Also making his feature debut is cinematographer Paul Myers. He captures intimate moments as beautifully as he does the wide open desert and crumbling small towns. There is an art to knowing when to move in close and when to pull back and Myers and Webley find that balance. This is a film that understands the importance of showing not telling, and Myers is able to deliver some very small moments of childhood innocence and obliviousness in a way that highlights the hope and resilience of kids who grow up without a lot.

Omaha is the type of independent film that knows what it wants to say and is able to do so without a lot of added baggage. It also trusts the audience to follow along without overexplaining. Some closing text does offer insight into a little-known truth of recent history, providing context that in some ways feels like it comes too late. And yet, knowing too much of where this story is going might derail the film’s best qualities. It is a road trip movie in which the journey and the destination are equally important, building to a gut punch of a final act that also leaves us with a sliver of deserved hope. 

Grade: A

This review is from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival where Omaha had its world premiere. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.