There’s a sickness that festers quietly in forgotten parts of the country. Not just poverty, or trauma, or politics, but something deeper — the sense that nobody is listening, that systems were built not to help you but to swallow you whole. Sovereign is a film about what happens when a man lives too long with that silence. And then begins to speak.
Nick Offerman doesn’t play Jerry Kane like a villain. He plays him like a man who’s already been defeated long before we meet him — crushed beneath bureaucracy, grief, loss, and years of being unseen. And that’s what makes him so dangerous. This isn’t rage born out of ideology. It’s ideology born out of pain. The pain of being powerless. And the world being perfectly fine with it.
Offerman is frighteningly good. His usual warmth is burned down to embers, buried beneath survivalist grit and soft-spoken sermons about sovereignty, liberty, and justice that he seems to be preaching just as much to himself as to his young son, Joe. The tragedy — and the genius — of Sovereign is that it doesn’t make Jerry a fanatic. It makes him heartbreakingly relatable. A father who wants to protect his child. A man who believes he’s finally found the truth. And once he believes it, he teaches it.
Joe, played with gut-punching subtlety by Jacob Tremblay, is still young enough to follow without question, but even he begins to sense they're fighting a losing battle, and through his innocent, untarnished eyes, we see he's not invested in the fury, the rebellion, he is invested in his dad. But what Jerry teaches is fury. It’s a quiet, righteous, convincing kind of fury — the kind that doesn’t scream, but simmers. About the government. The banks. The courts. The landlords. The cops. The unseen hands that squeeze people until they snap. And he’s not wrong. That’s the horrible part. Nothing Jerry says is entirely false. But none of it leads anywhere good.
This is the part of the film that stays in your stomach after it ends — the part that reflects back the brutal cycle of modern rebellion. Men like Jerry aren’t born violent. They’re eroded into it. Stripped of dignity, refused space to grieve, priced out of compassion. So they retreat into ideology. They study sovereign citizen theories. They turn their grief into gospel. And when they feel they have nothing left, they act. And when they act, people die. Sometimes the sons. Sometimes the cops. Sometimes everyone.
It’s devastating because you understand him. Not condone — understand. You feel how utterly broken a man has to be to convince himself that war with the state is the only path left. And the film makes you sit with that. Not from the distance of a newspaper headline, but up close. In the motel rooms. In the van. At the roadside. In the longing glances of a boy who wants to play football but is being taught to prepare for death.
Christian Swegal’s direction is stripped-back and intimate. The cinematography leans into grey skies and hollow spaces, as though the world itself has given up on colour. There are long silences where we feel the weight of each breath, the tension of a life always on the verge of ending. Dennis Quaid plays Police Chief Bouchart, a man with his own ideas of law and legacy, forming a bitter parallel to Jerry’s crusade. Two fathers — both believers — both incapable of seeing the world beyond their own truth.
But it’s Jerry and Joe who linger. Because their story isn’t about extremism. It’s about inheritance. What happens when you pass down anger, instead of healing. What happens when a child becomes a vessel for your grief. What happens when you teach him to be sovereign in a world already caged in laws and guns and surveillance and bureaucracy. That’s the cruelty of it — that even if you're right about the world, it doesn’t care. It will still crush you. And it will teach your child to be next.
I don’t think I’ve seen a film this year that so perfectly captures the spiritual exhaustion of modern resistance — the way that even the act of standing up feels doomed. Not because the beliefs are wrong, but because the machine is already too big, too old, too rigged. You can scream, or you can run, or you can shoot, but the end is always waiting.
Sovereign doesn’t offer resolution. It doesn’t ask for forgiveness. It just opens up a window and forces us to watch as pain is passed down like an heirloom. It is a tragic, fiercely intelligent, emotionally devastating portrait of the fury that fills the void when love and hope are gone. And it’s happening right now, all around us. In garages. On message boards. In lonely motel rooms. In the silence between a father and son who no longer know how to talk — only how to prepare for war.
And that’s the tragedy. That no one’s listening until the bullets start flying. And by then, it’s already too late.
9/10
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