The Long Haul Tribeca Review: Margo Martindale Carries a Slow, Striking Road Drama

The Long Haul is about as straightforward as an American indie drama can get. Writer and director David Drake’s feature debut takes a traditional festival premise and strips it down to its barest essentials. The narrative follows a veteran truck driver quietly grappling with the sudden reemergence of a deep personal tragedy that she spent decades trying to outrun.

The Long Haul Tribeca Review

Margo Martindale in The Long Haul, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 7, 2026.

On paper, it reads like a standard character study to place in a major festival lineup. However, thanks to a strong lead performance from the brilliant Margo Martindale, the project succeeds on its own merits. It transforms into a quiet, contemplative, and strikingly moving film about working-class perseverance.

Martindale stars as CJ, a grizzled long-haul driver who has spent thirty-five years behind the wheel of her own rig. Even with decades of independence under her belt, she still finds herself navigating the lower end of the professional totem pole as an older woman in a heavily male-dominated industry. Her carefully isolated world is rocked when she receives a notice from a parole board, forcing a hidden pocket of past trauma back into her daily life.

The Long Haul smartly avoids spelling out the explicit details of this historical hurt for most of its runtime. Instead, Drake shrouds her internal struggle in an effective air of mystery as she crosses the country. Along the highway, we observe her in various episodic encounters. These include tense run-ins with her shrewd, nonsensically aggravating young boss, played with an enjoyable brashness by Cole Sprouse, and a quiet bond she forms with a migrant woman, played by Yalitza Aparicio, whom she takes under her wing.

This is undeniably a challenging piece of cinema because it’s driven almost solely by the weight of Martindale’s physical presence. Luckily, she delivers nothing less than one of the finest performances of the year. The movie operates like a claustrophobic chamber piece on wheels, where CJ’s tightly bottled emotions slowly simmer to the point of an inevitable third-act eruption.

Martindale brings a beautiful, lived-in authenticity to every frame. Whether she’s smoking a cigarette against the dashboard, singing along to the radio, or dyeing her hair in a dingy gas station bathroom, she makes this character feel real. She captures the fierce, no-nonsense grit of a woman who answers to no one, making the emotional cracks in her armor feel earned. Her screen presence is matched in small part through a mostly off-screen performance from Stephen Root, who joins her near the end in her best scene.

Because her performance is so singularly gripping, it’s a shame that the rest of the film occasionally lets her down. The Long Haul suffers from a glacial pace that borders on absurdity by the time it finally allows its lead to deliver her climactic monologue. At points, the narrative moves so slowly that less patient viewers might find themselves willing to turn it off.

Is The Long Haul worth watching?

The underlying script feels distinctly underwritten, failing to flesh out the supporting characters or the central mystery with the same care given to its protagonist. Yet, in those final, breathtaking moments, Martindale overcomes the narrative flaws. Her captivating presence makes the surrounding slowness feel far more interesting and profound than The Long Haul probably deserves to be. It’s uncommon for a movie with such a weak structural backbone to feel this impactful, but the power of its central character study carries the weight of the production.

The Long Haul premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs from June 3 to 14, 2026.

The Long Haul Tribeca Review: Margo Martindale Carries a Slow, Striking Road Drama