PARK CITY, Utah—Omaha is a small, delicate film marked by few momentous narrative incidents. Yet Cole Webley’s directorial debut has something lacking from so many higher-profile and bigger-budgeted efforts, including its compatriots at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: an authentic feel for the texture, atmosphere, and interior life of its everyday American landscapes and the people who travel through, and struggle to inhabit, them.
A road-trip saga initiated by a father who won’t explain the purpose of the impromptu journey to his two children, it’s a model of tone, concision, and emotional and psychological insight, led by a staggering performance from John Magara and an equally moving one from pint-sized co-star Molly Belle Wright.