Hudson: Review

15th September 2021

Hudson Struggles to Find Its Voice. By Jan Kalina.

Hudson starts with the two estranged cousins reuniting. Ryan (Gregory Lay) shows up at Hudson’s (David Neal Levin) door. It doesn’t take long for them to catch up. Ryan exaggerates his filmmaking and acting life in the big city and then the conversation steers towards reminiscence of Hudson’s mother, who has passed away recently.

After a while, where the audience finds out that Ryan is not such a big shot as he paints himself to be and Hudson is indeed the timid man he paints himself to be, they decide that they should go on a road trip upstate, with a clear objective to scatter mother’s ashes around a tree she often spoke of in her past. Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker, named Sunrise (Mary Catherine Greenwal), and form a bond.

What I have to lift up about the film is the mellow, feel-good score by Julian Scherle. It just sets the pace for the film and it gets going. It’s one of those pieces of music that you can put into your ears and just go for a walk.

The acting between the three leads feels so genuine as if they really would be friends that
just met along the way on a trip.

But otherwise Hudson is a film that struggles to find its voice and then it falls into the ‘mumblecore’ category. Mumblecore being that the film focuses more on the dialogue and characters rather than a plot.

The film keeps you waiting for something to happen, but in the end nothing actually does. Hudson is one of those films where the journey is what matters not the destination. But the journey should have been more enticing.

It’s just a bunch of ordinary people on a road trip, and they somewhat become closer or friends but not really. It’s a film that starts out with an obvious goal (reuniting estranged cousins and scattering Hudson’s mother’s ashes) but in the end the characters accomplish nothing and I have no idea why to watch this film or what to learn from it.

It tries to be a feel good film but the film’s aimlessness is what makes the film tiresome and the reason it ultimately crumbles and falters.

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