Cold Wallet

How do people manage to get into so much trouble with cryptocurrency? From the moment that Billy (Raúl Castillo) starts proselytising about it in his local bar, it’s clear that he’s way out of his depth – he actually believes that he’s getting free money, with nary a question about where it’s coming from. Whilst it’s easy to look down on people like this, however, Cutter Hodierne’s film, which is screening as part of SXSW 2024, succeeds in giving him so much human warmth that you’ll root for him regardless, and perhaps go away feeling more sympathy.

The key to it, of course, is desperation. Billy latches onto the Tulip app (he presumably hasn’t studied much history) because it’s the only means he can see whereby he might gain some control of his life. He longs to buy a house so that his daughter Stephanie can stay over when she comes to visit him, and somewhere in this fantasy he also imagines that her mother will take him back, that they can be a family again. An edge of aggression emerges when his ex-wife disrupts this dream, and we see his potential for unpleasantness, but mostly his immaturity. He doesn’t understand why life hasn’t worked out for him. He is, at base, a nice guy, and he’s not prepared for the big bad world in which people can be completely amoral.

Naturally, the Tulip dream becomes a nightmare, and Billy is left distraught, unable to fully grasp what has happened. That’s when he and his martial arts buddy Dom (Tony Cavalero) get together with a friend from the internet, Eva (Melonie Diaz) who has a more militant response to their situation. Having used her hacker skills to track down the address where Tulip capital was registered, she persuades the men to join her in a scheme to hold the resident of that remote house hostage and force him to give them the cold wallet – the device in which their money is electronically stored – so that, she says, they can return the lost funds to everyone who fell victim to the scam.

In a story heavily focused on character interaction, comedy sits side by side with dark thriller elements. There’s a general appreciation for the absurdity of the world in which these variously vulnerable people live, with a wonderful early scene in which our erstwhile heroes visit a superstore to buy guns, openly discussing their different fighting preferences and all but telling the cheerful sales assistant abut their plans. Of course, once they reach their destination they quickly realise that actually doing this sort of thing is very different from planning it, and that psychological disconnect is also important to the emotional impact of what follows.

There’s a great performance here from Josh Brener as the principal antagonist, a man whose terror we can see beneath the surface but whose skills as a conman conceal it pretty well as he tries one gambit after another to try to gain control of the situation. The different emotional functions necessary to do the things he’s done add further layers of complexity as the story develops, and what initially seemed like a simple scheme rapidly becomes difficult and dangerous. Certain hints are perhaps a little too heavily applied, and you might guess a few secrets too soon, but overall the film is well balanced and entertaining, with a few real scares thrown in there.

Hodierne handles the blend of styles within the film with a laid back confidence that makes it easy to lower one’s guard at the wrong moments. At other times, the sheer number of things that could go wrong will keep you on the edge of your seat. Too many films attract comparisons to the work of the Coen brothers, but here that’s deserved, with the combination of deadpan humour, flawed but loveable human beings and very bad things creating a very particular mood which fans of that type of filmmaking will love.