Delivery Run (Grimmfest 2024)

Online food delivery workers finally get their moment in the headlights in Joel Palmroos’ wintry rendition of Steven Spielberg’s road rage classic Duel. Getting it’s World Premiere at the recent Grimmfest, Delivery Run is a Finnish production set in Minnesota USA but seamlessly filmed entirely in Lapland. The story revolves around a single day in the life of down on his luck delivery driver Lee, a gambler and all-round loser who starts the day threatened by gangsters he is in debt to in his own home and it manages to go downhill from there. While making one of his deliveries he overtakes an ominous looking snow-plough, a seemingly innocuous gesture that sets off a tit-for-tat road rage conflict that escalates to some gruesome places. 

It’s one of the seminal thriller premises, a simple overtake that devolves into automated war that has proved to be a story that filmmakers have returned to again and again, chiefly for how minimalist Spielberg’s execution of the story is and how much this tale lends itself to a visual medium. What’s more, a mere man vs truck story effortlessly devolves into a complex study of masculine rage and anxiety, America’s fraught dependence on car-based infrastructure, as well as the American psyche post-Manson Murders and mid-Vietnam war. It’s a singular yet adaptable fable that lends itself well to interpretation, and Delivery Run makes the case for a snow swept retelling featuring a snow-plough as the mechanical monster.

Perhaps the most overt stylistic choice Palmroos makes is to turn this into a comedy thriller in a sort of indie friendly, self-deprecating protagonist sort of way. Unfortunately from the first scene it’s apparent that the performers struggle with the limp material they’ve been given with the script featuring some pretty weak joke writing, but whatever minor awkwardness is present in these scenes becomes impossible to ignore thanks to the incredibly overbearing score. When the action scenes occur the music fits, but in the comedy sections the score becomes this cartoonish, plinky-plonky goofball vibe that fails to match the energy of the film at all, a hint of the general technical dissonance to come.

Like Duel, Delivery Run is also a cheapo genre production made with little time and resources to pull off what it wants, but it’s easy to overlook how effortlessly Spielberg made it look all the way back in 1971 and forget that he came out the gate one of the most gifted young director of his, or indeed any, generation, with Duel being one of the strongest feature debuts in history. In Palmroos’ defence, the effort is clearly on display. There’s energy and an urgency to this night-from-hell premise that whizzes through its 80 minute runtime: unnecessary coda notwithstanding. And the film absolutely looks the part too, the Lapland surroundings instantly up the production value and the snow-plough that the entire story revolves around itself is an excellent find, a dark hulking mass of chains and metal that clashes satisfyingly with Lee’s bright yellow saloon car. But it’s in the execution of Delivery Run’s set pieces where it falters, there’s plenty of build-up to it’s vehicular action but once the film reaches them they appear to just come and go, seemingly lost in the edit. The action lacks the oomph you’re craving for while the perfunctory drama goes on, and while the film has all the ingredients it needs on-screen to fulfil its execution- the camerawork, the setting, the vehicles- the filmmaking always seems to stumble at the crucial last minute.

In any other film this would feel like small-fry, an indie thriller that just about lacks the technical chops it needs to break the passable mark. However, the admittedly commendable effort to try and update a stone-cold classic from one of cinema’s best means that Delivery Run’s flaws are magnified tenfold. Maybe it’s unfair for me to keep dredging up Duel, but for a die-hard Spielberg fan like myself it’s in the many ways Delivery Run fails to recreate Duel’s intimidating magic that the film is most interesting. Palmroos’ heavy reliance on music compared to Spielberg’s masterful use of silence, the heaps of exposition and dialogue Alexander Arnold’s Lee has been given compared to the wonderful to-the-point simplicity of Dennis Weaver’s David. Without the Duel comparison to me there’s little of value in Delivery Run’s strengths or weaknesses. So you can take or leave this as a fairly uninteresting genre exercise in isolation or an excellent counterpoint to support the strengths of a different masterpiece.

Jake’s Archive – Delivery Run