Summary
Ride or Die is scheduled for release in 2025 as an American romantic thriller centered around Paula and Sloane, two young women whose deep-rooted trust is put to the test on an emotionally charged cross-country trip. The film is directed by Josalynn Smith, who is making her feature-length directorial debut. It is a revealing and intricate portrayal of queer relationships and unapologetic love, feelings we try to escape from.
The narrative opens in St. Louis, Missouri with Paula, who just graduated from college and returned home for the summer, looking to spend time with family. As an aspiring filmmaker, she feels stuck in her career and is burdened with unresolved feelings from her past. While rediscovering her hometown, she unexpectedly encounters Sloane, a classmate from high school and a former love interest, who never left St. Louis.
Sloane represents the version of life Paula attempted to escape. Despite the differences in their life choices, the connection they share is powerful, and what initiates as a mundane reunion transforms into a profound emotional and romantic bond.
Both women decide to take a spontaneous trip to California. With each mile they drive, the women feel the kind of freedom and emotional connection eluded them previously in Missouri. However, romantic escapades take a backseat to more complex issues as time progresses. Ultimately, Sloane’s past is more complicated than Paula imagined and forces her to reckon with whether she truly knows—or can love—the the person next to her.
Farther and farther from home, emotional distance begins to warp the bond the women share. Love is tested from outside and their intertwined truths. By journey’s end, confronting love’s resilience amid the absence of honesty, safety, and personal identity becomes imperative.
Cast and Characters
Briana Middleton as Paula
Paula is an ambitious, albeit anxious, post-college professional racked with uncertainty and familial expectations. She seeks clarity in relationships and emotional fulfillment, but as her partnership with Sloane develops, begins to grapple with whether she wants what she once did.
Stella Everett as Sloane
Sloane is a character who is emotionally self-sufficient and enigmatic. While she is coping with her various responsibilities back at home, she is burdened with internal emotional wounds that surface only gradually during the road trip. The relationship she shares with Paula is at once liberating and perilous—filled with deep, aching desire but cloaked in secrets.
Seth Gilliam as Creon
Creon fills the role of Paula’s stepfather and serves as a soothing, calming counterbalance to her otherwise tumultuous home life. He also works as a foil to the calm turbulence that Sloane brings to Paula’s life.
Guinevere Turner as Jay, Eisa Davis as Sherri (Paula’s mother), Cody Kostro as Anthony, and Ella Jay Basco as Bree comprise the cast in supporting roles, portraying with nuance the lives that the protagonists intersect with and leave behind. Every interaction, including the many blank spaces in the sisters’ lives, pivotally deepen or challenge regarding Paula and Sloane’s relationship.
Direction and Screenplay
Josalynn Smith directs with a naturalistic eye, ensuring the film is visually rich and emotionally understated. Smith and Louzoun-Heisler’s screenplay preserves the film’s backbone as it retains the spirit of the novel, preserving its essence. Through powerful, simple words, they strike a perfect balance with the film’s tender yet raw soul.
The film’s structure reflects the psychological trajectory of its core couple: It begins as an exhilarating getaway, an adventure infused with optimism, while over time, transforming into a journey rife with uncertainty and strain. The essence of this story lies in its depiction of the newness of love and how delicate it can be—especially when intertwined with personal wounds and past regrets.
Rather than leaning into familiar road trip clichés, the film prioritizes emotional distance between characters. Tight framing, elongated silences, and minor movements draw viewers into the small world Paula and Sloane inhabit within their vehicle, motels, gas stations, and diners. The camera often lingers, granting space to express difficult emotions.
Themes and Symbolism
- The Road as a Mirror
The physical journey across America mirrors the internal journeys of Paula and Sloane. Open roads and unoccupied landscapes embody the pair’s yearning for renewal and liberation. However, just as the road stretches endlessly, so do their unresolved conflicts. The further they go, the more exposed they are—not just to one another, but to themselves.
- Queer Relationships and Their Flaws
Unlike many other films that idealize queer love, this film portrays it with the recognition of emotional hazards that could come along, offering a mature celebration of passion. Both women in the film have their respective deep flaws resulting from their environment and circumstances. Their relationship can be viewed as both a sanctuary and trigger, which displays the edifying intricacy of queer relationships outside the sanitized norm.
- Unspoken Truths and Identity
In this film, one of the most interesting aspects is highlighted concentration upon what is not being talked about. Sloane has secrets concerning her past and mental health. Saundra, on the other side of the romance, is projecting on Sloane a romance that she has created in her head. Ultimately, both characters need to come face to face with the sobering notion that in order to love someone, we must learn that knowing someone does not equal understanding them.
- Freedom and Taking Responsibility
Both Paula and Sloane are on the run from family, pain or an impending responsibility. Their road trip serves as a metaphorical escape but this film strongly questions whether confrontation, accountability, and healing is essential before achieving true freedom. Though the women attempt to go on a physical journey towards escape, they are forced to deal with the issues that they have always avoided on much deeper levels.
Cinematography and Sound
The emotions of the film’s characters are mirrored in their natural surroundings, intertwined with both broad landscapes and close-up shots. Daytime evokes warmth and hope, symbolizing freedom like the open skies. Nighttime scenes, however, convey vulnerability and discomfort. It is like open roads, physically and emotionally unmoored, encapsulating the essence of the cinematography and the first-time director’s work.
While the score is minimalist in nature, its haunting qualities emerge during silence, which carries its own emotional weight. Whenever music does come in, it is only during critical emotional peaks so as not to overshadow the performances, allowing silence to emphasize the undercurrent of emotion.
Festival Reception and Reviews
Introduced during the Tribeca Film Festival, it became noteworthy for its powerful performances, realism and restraint. The film also received praise for the emotional complexity and for the interplay between the two leads. Ride or die gained popularity as the layered dynamic of the characters resonated with viewers.
In her review, she commended both Middleton and Everett for making the characters believable and relatable. Other critics noted the romantic buoyancy as well as the psychological depth of the film and how the shifts between them happen seamlessly.
Some viewers did not appreciate the slow pace combined with an unresolved ending while other viewers found the choice to lean heavily towards realism commendable. Throughout the film, the characters were not moralized or simplified but rather portrayed as complex individuals dealing with multifaceted emotions and their intertwined histories.
Conclusion
In defying conventions and clear-cut categorizations, Ride or Die is both a romantic thriller and bold debut work. A deep psychological exploration of the emotional impact of desire, deception, and motives behind them, it steers clear from shallow impulse driven sensationalism.
The film tells a love story devoid of a fairytale resolution; rather, it is candid, often messy, and at times heart-wrenching. Audience members are invited to grapple with the notion of how much we truly understand about those we claim to love, and whether love is capable of enduring the aftermath of unveiled truths.
In Ride or Die, viewers are presented with rich, authentic, multi-dimensional portrayals of queer women. A compelling work which goes beyond a mere road trip film, it provides a heartfelt and poignant exploration of relationships and self. An emotional journey that reveals the greatest distance to traverse may be the one between two people who believed they were journeying together.
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