SDIFF 2025 : Omaha We gotta go to the Zoo!

After a family tragedy, Dad takes his two kids and the family dog off on a cross-country road trip, while preparing for a heartbreaking end.

The death of a spouse, a partner, half of the parental units that raise kids together, is always a devastating thing, especially when they leave behind particularly young children. The surviving parent has lost a partner, potentially a second money earner, the person they hopefully loved this whole time, and now has to take on both parental roles and let their children grieve and mourn while repressing their own sadness. And without some kind of help – societal, governmental, familial, whatever – the remaining parent is likely to crack under the strain at the most inopportune moment possible. Just bear that in mind as we head into the movie.

So, mum has passed on and the raggedy little house has been foreclosed, and kids Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and Charlie (Wyatt Solis) are being woken before sunrise by their beleaguered father (John Magaro), to pile into the semi-functional car to leave, even as the sheriff arrives.

After a pitiful exchange with the sheriff, Dad makes his getaway with the kids and the dog.

Even with all Charlie’s exuberance and Ella’s suspicions, the kids in the car on the forced road trip are a lot more well-behaved and quiet than most regular children. Getting answers about where we’re going and what we’re doing out of Dad is about as fun and easy as pulling teeth. Like most kids, the kids want ice cream and road toys from the various shops and gas stations they stop at, but Dad is pinching pennies hard enough to make them bleed. They stay at motels and have an okay time with the pool, and in between times of raucous kid laughter and CD songs, sing-along with Mom’s voice, Dad is keeping a shattering secret.

Dad does and says a lot of things that just don’t make sense to the 9-year-old Ella, much less to us, the audience. He finally tells his kids they’re heading to Nebraska, of all places, but never once is there an indication he or they have family there to go visit, or any other reason to go to freaking Nebraska. In a scene that absolutely wrecks both the kids and the audience, Dad abruptly stops and gives the family dog to an SPCA on the way, offering only a lame, “It’s better this way,” by way of explanation. Dad has an envelope stuffed in the car’s glove box, with both his kids’ Social Security Cards and Birth Certificates inside, which certainly seems alarming.

Dad skimps on his own food entirely to give his kids the Lunchables they really want, which he can only afford for them. Dad talks to himself, or perhaps the ghost of his dead wife, and cries when he thinks the kids won’t see him. But Dad also pulled it together enough to take a friendly suggestion and take his kids to the Omaha Zoo, for gorgeous memories with great cats, laughing on the merry-go-round, and fun in the butterfly tent.

Everything has led up to this moment, this very final moment, after we’ve made it through a rather long road trip, all the way to Omaha, Nebraska. And if you thought the scene where Rex, the family dog, was given away was hard to watch, the hospital scene in the movie’s final act came through like a wrecking ball and just utterly destroyed everyone.

The explanatory paragraphs after the movie ends, about the Safe Haven Laws being enacted in 2008 with very broad, unclear definitions, causing a bunch of children above infant age to be abandoned in Nebraska, provide ruinous clarity to the whole movie, which is likely why they finished with the information instead of beginning with it. No matter how gorgeous and lovingly shot the zoo and kids-playing scenes might be, the weakness and cowardice of Dad, even if we might have sympathy for his plight, casts an overwhelming shadow on the whole film.