Movies like Roofman

Roofman reframes a petty-crime conceit as a study of compromised care — but does the film grant permission to its protagonist or merely record his refusals? It presents a compact, traceable premise: a former Army Ranger reduced to fatherhood and furtive theft, nicknamed Roofman for cutting holes in McDonald’s roofs, who escapes custody, hides inside a Toys R Us for months, and then finds intimacy with a divorced mother as his past closes in. The facts are spare. The argument is insistently moral rather than sensational. The film stages its tension in confined interiors and nocturnal retail geometries, favoring tight compositions and handheld immediacy that keep the camera close to the body and the bargain between survival and dignity. Pacing is slow-burn: scenes accumulate small, revealing gestures rather than punctuated heists, and the soundscape and muted texture privilege the echo of aisles and the friction of domestic compromise. Tonally it sits between crime-thriller precision and comedy-drama awkwardness, which allows moments of dark levity without releasing the structural suspense of the cat-and-mouse between a man trying not to be seen and a community unwittingly intimate with him. As criticism, the film’s principal interest is ethical: it makes economic precarity legible through choreography, not lecture, and it keeps its sympathy provisional. That refusal to resolve — to convert moral unease into tidy redemption or condemnation — is the film’s aftertaste. Roofman asks the viewer to watch proximity as a moral condition, and it leaves the question of permission simmering rather than answered.