Thel­ma review – June Squibb final­ly gets her star­ring role

At 93 years old, Thel­ma Post (June Squibb) remains fierce­ly inde­pen­dent, liv­ing in the Cal­i­for­nia home she shared with her late hus­band despite her family’s con­cerns that she’s too frail to be on her own. Her grand­son Dan­ny (Fred Hechinger) has more faith in her – maybe because she’s the only one who seems to have any faith in him – and vis­its reg­u­lar­ly, help­ing Thel­ma learn how to use her com­put­er and fill­ing her in on how things are going with his ex-girlfriend.

But one morn­ing, Thel­ma gets a fran­tic phone call from some­one claim­ing to be Dan­ny, explain­ing he’s been in a car acci­dent and needs her to bail him out of jail. Sweet Thel­ma springs into action to help her grand­son and prompt­ly posts $10,000 to a PO box…only for it to tran­spire that Dan­ny was fast asleep in bed, and Thel­ma has been the vic­tim of a par­tic­u­lar­ly insid­i­ous phone scam.

When the police are indif­fer­ent to Thelma’s plight, she refus­es to take no for an answer, and sets out on a mis­sion to reclaim what was tak­en. After con­vinc­ing her friend Ben (Richard Roundtree) to lend her his mobil­i­ty scoot­er – which he agrees to, as long as they’re back in time for his star­ring role in the care home’s pro­duc­tion of Annie – she sets off to track down the thieves and get her mon­ey back.

A zany road movie fol­lows, tak­ing cues from The Straight Sto­ry (although lack­ing the ram­bling mag­ic of Lynch’s film) and Lit­tle Miss Sun­shine as Thel­ma makes her way to the PO Box in ques­tion while her daugh­ter (Park­er Posey), son-in-law (Clark Gregg) and Dan­ny try to track her down. The nar­ra­tive is pret­ty straight­for­ward, though Squibb and Roundtree’s delight­ful exchanges keep the ener­gy up as they bick­er about her stub­born quest for retribution.

Even with its feath­er-light tone, the film does effec­tive­ly ramp up the ten­sion when Thel­ma appears to get in over her head, and she’s able to weaponise the per­cep­tion of her as a dod­der­ing old lady. The dri­ve of the film as an inspi­ra­tional riposte against ageism seems a lit­tle patro­n­is­ing (in the vain of ​‘They’ve still got it!’ clas­sics such as Going in Style and The Buck­et List) and Thel­ma fits rather too neat­ly into the clas­sic Sun­dance for­mu­la (quirky but sort of for­get­table Amer­i­can indie com­e­dy) but there’s no doubt­ing June Squibb’s charis­ma, and it’s refresh­ing to see her in a lead role at the grand age of 94.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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