WESTHAMPTON (2025)

Starring Finn Wittrock, RJ Mitte, Jake Weary, Amy Forsyth, Sam Strike, Mary Mallen, Joy Suprano, Dan Lauria, Roxanne Schiebergen, Tovah Feldshuh, Ritchie Coster, James Beneduce, Chris Gray, Emily Jayne, Gabrielle Manna, Alex Scoloveno, Joshua Screen, Luke Slattery, Eric Striffler, Eric Tabach, Jessy Yates and Samantha Yestrebsky.

Screenplay by Christian Nilsson.

Directed by Christian Nilsson.

Distributed by Obscured Releasing. 94 minutes. Not Rated.

You can’t go home again, they say. This is particularly true about Tom (played by Finn Wittrock), a struggling film director who has just made a film based on a trauma he had as a teen in his native Westhampton, Massachusetts. Tom left soon after the incident and never looked back. He actually actively avoided going back home.

Years later both of his parents have died, and his sister insists that he come to Westhampton to clear out his stuff so that she can sell their house. Tom tells her to just throw everything away, but she refuses. He has to go home and go through the things. Then if he wants them thrown away, he can do it himself.

So he reluctantly goes back home, only to find that as much as he doesn’t want to be there, many of the people from his past don’t want him there either. They seem actively angered by the fact that he had made a movie about a traumatic incident that left deep scars on the town.

“It’s like coming back to the exact place where the crime happened, which is the place you’re running away from your whole life,” Wittrock explained to me during a recent interview. “You have to come back to where the wound began to heal the wound in some way. I was just trying to get to the bottom of what he was going through. How he’s been trying to not really heal all these years. He’s basically trying to escape from himself. It turns out yourself is the one thing you can never escape from.”

Despite this, Tom is constantly looking for escape. He presents a quiet exterior while internally seething with guilt and anger. In fact, we are introduced to Tom at a film screening of his movie Westhampton (yes, the film within the film has the same title as the actual film.) He is doing a Q&A about the film (which in a running gag is dismissively compared to “fucking Garden State”) and his answers are guarded and evasive. Then he gets into a fistfight with the moderator of the Q&A.

The film within the film is shown in this scene (and throughout the film), an arty, brooding black-and-white teen coming-of-age drama which ends with a fatal car crash.

The real story is much more subtle and nuanced – even the crash itself is manipulated in the film to shade the truth. Suddenly, back home in Westhampton, Tom is surrounded by people who know what really happened – and who have been living with the fallout ever since. Many of them are not happy to see him.

Particularly unhappy to see him is Dickie (Jake Weary), a local cop and the older brother of the girl portrayed in Tom’s film. Her other brother, Fitz (RJ Mitte), a sweet bartender who’s a little slow – something a neighbor crudely points out early on – is much happier to see Tom.

Tom runs into her younger sister Avery (Amy Forsyth) at a beach party without realizing who she is, as he hasn’t seen her since she was a child. It’s left somewhat ambiguous whether Avery recognizes him immediately, though the film suggests she probably does. And Tom’s new friendship with Dickie’s baby sister just gets the cop even more suspicious and pissed off at him.

Towards the end of the film, Tom stops into a local off-season attraction, a huge labyrinth made up of hundreds of white linen sheets which is situated on the shoreline. Tom tries to negotiate the maze, hitting a series of wrong turns and dead ends as he tries to find a way out. This is heavily symbolic (perhaps too symbolic?) of Tom’s emotional journey – a disorienting mix of windblown fabric, the sound of crashing waves and subtle movements coming from all directions as others (maybe real or maybe imagined) pass by.

And when it is revealed specifically how the film’s narrative differs from real life, Tom’s grief and guilt become even more understandable, although his actions perhaps become even less defensible.

Wittrock holds it all together in a quiet, internally tortured performance. As he explained in our interview, “I was very interested in playing a character that most of his internal life stays internal. He’s not that expressive in his words or anything else. I was very interested in finding a way into a quieter, tortured guy that didn’t really know how to let it out. To see if I could pull that off.” He does pull it off with style.

Other actors who stand out include Mitte, whose sweet demeanor hides a deceptively complicated local whom most of the neighbors write off as simple. Weary brings the anger and recrimination as Dickie, but eventually even he shows some growth and change. Forsyth is cute and teasing in her role, and understandably curious about his relationship with her sister. There are also a couple of strong takes by old-school veteran actors Tovah Feldshuh, radiating goodness and grace as Tom’s former schoolteacher, and Dan Lauria as the boorish but well-meaning and helpful neighbor.

Also, Joy Suprano makes a big impression in a difficult and conflicted role which I can’t really describe without giving up a huge spoiler.

Nilsson directs it all with a quiet confidence, letting tension simmer rather than explode, and trusting the audience to piece together the emotional truth.

Ultimately, Westhampton is a film defined by its restraint – sometimes to its benefit, sometimes to its detriment. Nilsson builds toward revelations that genuinely deepen the story, even if the path there can feel a bit uneven. What carries it is Wittrock’s internalized performance and the lived‑in tension of the town around him. The film doesn’t quite achieve everything it reaches for, but what it does achieve is honest, thoughtful, and quietly affecting.

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2026 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: July 29, 2026.