No money changes hands in “Cold Wallet,” but it’s on everyone’s mind after a cryptocurrency exchange suddenly goes down when George Hegel, the one person with the password to the operation is said to have died, tying up all the actual cash that people have put into it, hoping to strike it rich after hearing of the GameStop windfall. Billy (Raul Castillo) certainly has such high hopes, having emptied out his bank account and buying his daughter a PS5 for Christmas while his ex-wife wonders why the mortgage on the house she got in the divorce still hasn’t been paid, and it turns out he’s also tied up his friend Dom, who bought a gym based on a belief their stock in a company called Tulip just continue to rise. These aren’t the brightest bulbs we’re dealing with in Cutter Hodierne’s darkly funny caper, made all the more so when the director who previously made the slick Somalia-set thriller “Fishing Without Nets” brings a similar energy to the film, where the director and writer John Hibey have surely worked out every angle while the characters clearly have not.
It’s indicative of the clever way “Cold Wallet” bridges the divide between the cyber world and reality that when Billy and Dom visit Eva (Melonie Diaz), a local hacker the former has come to know on crypto message boards, that the unsheathing of a USB drive subtly sounds as if a gun is being unholstered. Ironically, she’s the one most adamant about getting the real thing when the trio learns George could be not only alive and well, but living one town over rather than being a corpse in Kenya and hasty plans are made to break into his house and redistribute his wealth. That part comes easily, but the question of what they’re actually looking for is a source of tension when there’s no safe to break into where stacks of bills sit. Hodierne and Hibey may not have the usual markers of success for a heist film, but they do have new variables when Billy and Dom’s friendship is tested by what they don’t know about crypto and Eva does, as they also have to deal with their unwelcoming host (Josh Brener), who tries to plant as many seeds of doubt as he can to pit them against one another while he’s tied up.
There probably is only one time any film could get away with using the line “You’ve messed with the wrong subreddit!” As a big dramatic moment, but “Cold Wallet” makes the most of it and benefits greatly from the performances of a strong cast, particularly “Righteous Gemstones” standout Tony Cavalero as Dom, the judo instructor whose paradoxical belief in nonviolence is in direct conflict with what he must be capable of to survive the night. The film wisely never puts too fine a point on the idea that there are things said on the internet that never would be in real life, but there is something interesting in seeing people start to lose illusions about who they are under duress as they show themselves to others under the cloak of anonymity online. Clearly after two thrillers about scrappy average folks who turn to crime as the only way towards leveling the playing field, this is what Hodierne is about and as the characters demonstrate the accumulation of wealth isn’t a reflection of one’s worth, “Cold Wallet” like “Fishing Without Nets” before it plays in the same waters as the big boys with surely a fraction of the budget, a film full of the kind of satisfying cheap thrills that money can’t buy.
“Cold Wallet” will screen again at SXSW on March 13th at 9:15 pm at Violet Crown Cinema 1 and 9:45 pm at Violet Crown Cinema 3.