There is a certain kind of movie that begins with a hush. A room that is too quiet. Two kids staring at a wall or a bed or a door that nobody will walk through again. Dan Kay’s What We Hide opens in that hush, and it stays there for a long time. A young mother is gone. Two daughters remain. Spider, played by McKenna Grace, and Jessie, played by Jojo Regina. They look at the world and at each other and try to figure out the next step.
Do they cry and call for help. Do they bury the truth and keep going like they have a choice. There are no adults in the kitchen. There is a school bell that still rings and the fridge that still hums but the anchor has been cut. With the rest of their family out of the picture, Spider decides that the only way to keep Jessie near is to pretend. Pretend that things are fine. Pretend that she is older than she is. Pretend that food appears from nowhere and the light bill pays itself and that the people who stop by the house are just saying hello.
It is a brutal grown up decision made by a kid who should not have to think about any of this. She makes a plan. She will be the one who cooks and cleans and packs lunches. She will coach Jessie to keep quiet at school. She will put on a mask and push away friends so they will not notice what the two of them are covering up. You feel the pressure of it, especially when someone else starts circling. Dacre Montgomery shows up as the mother’s dealer, a guy with a mean streak who smells trouble and thinks the girls know where the money went or where the woman went. He knocks. He edges near. He threatens. He wants answers.
That danger, in big bold letters, is supposed to be the engine. On the other side of the horizon there is also a local sheriff played by Jesse Williams. He is a longtime family friend, which makes things complicated. He is a presence meant to steady the movie. You might expect him to be the person to finally notice the missing mother and take the girls to safety, but to Spider and Jessie he is a different kind of risk. If he gets too close he might be the one to separate them. The girls keep him at arm’s length because love can dismantle a secret just as quickly as violence can.
Kay wrote and directed the film, and he shares a story credit with journalist Julia Keller. The two were inspired by a true story. Children were left to fend for themselves after losing their mother. That seed is heartbreaking and it carries a rough kind of truth that audiences recognize as soon as they hear it. You want to care for the girls from the first scene. You want to see them lean on one another, you want to see them grow closer, and you want to see danger walk past their front door without stopping. The problem is not the starting point. The problem is what the movie does with it in the long run.
As the story builds, What We Hide settles into the rhythms of an earnest coming of age drama that wants to show resilience more than it wants to show the cost of it. The setup brings to mind Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, a furious story of a teenage girl cutting through a dangerous community in search of her absent father. It also echoes the old series The Boxcar Children, in which orphans cobble together a life from scraps and stubborn will. You can hear those influences almost right away. Yet Kay’s film does not find the same fire. It leans on long conversations, whispered fights between sisters, and repeated assurances that they can stick to their impossible plan if they are brave enough. The stakes should feel sharper. Instead they slide. You keep waiting for the hammer to drop, for cold reality to crash through the window. Instead the movie just keeps walking a straight line toward an ending you will likely predict.
That predictability hurts the tension. The theme of the opioid crisis, which hovers over the story, gives the film a serious mask. You are meant to see a wider tragedy here. Lives crushed. Communities hollowed out. The thing is, the film never digs much deeper than a headline might. It brings the crisis into the room but mostly as a backdrop. It is there to push the girls together and to force a few tears in the final act, not to expose systems or complicate the story with messy truths. The result is a drama that resembles an after school special. A sincere reminder that children suffer, and that hard things happen, and that resilience is good. It is not wrong. It just does not feel new.
The craft reinforces that impression. Kay teams with cinematographer Pip White, and together they choose a very clean look. The light tends to be bright and even. Rooms feel scrubbed. You can clearly see faces, which makes sense because the movie loves close ups of Spider and Jessie, those tear stained cheeks and those tight jawlines. You see their effort in the eyes. What you do not see is a strong sense of place. The locations lack texture. Their town should be a character that presses in from the edges. Instead the settings read like general spaces. A house. A street. A store. The staging rarely adds tension on its own. Many scenes sit at a table and talk until it is time for the next table, the next talk. There are exceptions, small moments when you feel the air get thin, but the movie does not build a thick mood. Not like Winter’s Bone did. That film used trees and hollows and quiet as weapons. This one keeps things flat. It never really shakes you.
And yet the performances keep your attention. McKenna Grace, who has given strong work again and again, wears Spider like a jacket she outgrew last year. At first she plays the familiar teen armor. Baggy clothes. Eyes down. A short fuse. Then, slowly, she softens in front of Jessie and also in front of a new boy in town, played by Forrest Goodluck. He is easy to like here. There is a scene where he gives Spider room to breathe and she allows herself to be seen. Not as a caretaker or a liar or a perfect planner, but as a kid who wants to be held for five minutes. Grace pulls off that shift without fanfare. It sneaks up on you. The movie is better every time it centers her and lets her be messy. She knows that the tough girl layer is not a personality so much as a shield she picked up on the way out of childhood. When Spider cracks you feel the person underneath, and she is worth meeting.
Jojo Regina is wonderful as Jessie. There is an open faced quality to her work that made me think of Abigail Breslin back when Little Miss Sunshine surprised people. Regina’s Jessie believes in plans. She believes in her sister and in school and in clear rules. Her innocence is not a joke. It is a constant contrast to the reality around her and often to the reality Spider is trying to keep hidden. You care about her at once because you understand how thin the safety net is. Regina finds little bits of humor and hope, even when the script hands her scenes that want only to deliver a lesson. She gives Jessie a sturdy core without making her a saint. I liked that.
Grace and Regina carry the movie together more than anyone else. When they sit on the floor and talk about what to do next, the movie lives. When they argue, it stings. When they make up, you believe it. Their bond is what you remember after the credits. That might sound like faint praise, but it is more than that. The two of them give the film its heartbeat. The issue is that they do not have enough around them to elevate the rest.
Some of the supporting beats feel stranded in another kind of movie. Dacre Montgomery plays the dealer as a snarling problem, a danger that the plot can point to whenever it needs to raise the pulse for a minute. He can be scary. The performance is not the issue so much as the writing around it. This character could have complicated the story with real pressure. Instead he is a symbol. He shows up, squeezes, and leaves. The sheriff played by Jesse Williams goes the other way. He is thoughtful and kind, a helper who tries not to scare the girls. He is also a tactic in the movie’s strategy of moral reassurance. The story wants him to prove that goodness still exists and that rules are not always cruel. But again the part feels a little borrowed. You know exactly who he is from the first time he appears. The script will not let him be anything else.
Kay even tosses in an asthma crisis at a critical moment. It is a device that many dramas use, the sudden medical emergency that forces a breaking point. You can imagine the reasons without me explaining. The problem is that once you recognize the device, you stop feeling it. I found myself one step ahead in that stretch, watching the movie check boxes it drew for itself. The same goes for the fake ID beats. Spider takes on the role of adult by faking age and authority. She tries to pass, to buy groceries, to negotiate, to keep the lie fed. All of that should be unnerving, and sometimes it is. Other times you can see the wheels turning.
I kept wishing the story would complicate its own comfort. The opioid crisis is not a tasteful backdrop. It is not a single villain or a single bad choice. It is a set of tangled causes that destroy in quiet ways as often as loud ones. The film knows that pain exists. It just does not want to show too much of the mess. There is a decency in that, an instinct to protect the audience and the characters. But protection is not always the same as truth. The more the movie pulls its punches, the more it feels like a summary rather than a dive.
Here is where someone might argue that I am asking the movie to be something it never meant to be. It wants to be about sisterhood. About a kid who refuses to be taken away from the one person left who still feels like home. It wants to be about body language in the kitchen and the bravery of getting up for school when your life has broken in two. If that is the case, does it matter if the plotting is gentle or the visuals are safe. Maybe not for everyone. But I think it matters here because the film keeps pointing at bigger things, then backing away from them. It mentions the darkness and then turns the light back on before your eyes adjust.
On the visual side, you can sense what Kay and Pip White hoped for. Keep us close to the girls. Keep the frame simple. Let the faces carry it. That approach can work when every other element is working in sync. When the blocking has meaning. When the color choices change with the characters. When the edit finds a rhythm that tightens until you are holding your breath without noticing. What We Hide does not find that rhythm. The cuts often feel routine. Coverage is coverage. The camera watches and records instead of searching for a language that supports the theme. A little grit, a little shadow, a little more silence between lines, could have gone a long way. Even the score seems designed to soothe rather than scrape.
None of this makes the movie worthless. It is simply limited. The more you watch, the more you can see the shape of what it could have been. Again, Winter’s Bone is the obvious comparison. That film is not only a hunt for a missing person. It is a map of a community where truth itself is a negotiation. It builds dread by showing how the ground under the main character keeps shifting. In Kay’s movie the ground stays firm. The danger arrives on schedule. The confrontations happen as planned. Food runs low at exactly the moment you expect it to. Help appears when the structure requires it. The ending crowns the message. There is comfort in that but not much discovery.
I do not want to undersell how good McKenna Grace is with tiny details. There is a glance she gives Jessie in one scene that says, forgive me, I am not as strong as I promised you, and also, we can do this for one more day. She makes Spider feel older than her years without losing the small behaviors that remind you she is still just a teenager. Forrest Goodluck adds warmth in a role that could have been thankless. His character draws Spider toward the possibility of normalcy, which is a dangerous fantasy in a story like this. He never pushes. He listens. That matters. It gives Grace the space to show another side of Spider without turning the film into a romance. Their scenes together work because they are gentle and slightly awkward, as they should be.
Jojo Regina has the task of holding both the truth and the lie at once. Jessie is young enough to still believe in the safety of rules, yet smart enough to know that something is badly wrong. Regina finds that thin line. Her face brightens even when her voice shakes. She is the kind of screen presence that can resist melodrama by just standing still and waiting for the world to come to her. I wish the script had given Jessie a few more private moments, little choices that are just hers and not about helping her sister or carrying a plot point. Even so, Regina shapes a real person out of what she has.
So where does that leave What We Hide. For me, it sits in the category of films that have their hearts in the right place and their heads stuck in a safer version of the story. It is a made for TV feel drama with a few scenes that land because the actors drag them over the line. It keeps its focus tight on the relationship that matters most, and that is the right instinct. But it does not trust itself to be as raw as it could be. It smooths edges. It files down the rough parts of a crisis that does not care how neat your arcs look.
There will be viewers who find solace in its tenderness. There will be others who want more than tenderness out of this material. I kept thinking of a different cut of the same movie, one that uses the dealer as a more complex threat, one that lets the sheriff make a harder choice, one that allows the girls to make a mistake that costs something they cannot easily replace. I kept thinking of a version that gives the town a smell and a sound, puts dirt under Spider’s nails, and lets silence do some of the talking.
And yes, I kept thinking of how stories like this have been told before. The comparison to Winter’s Bone is not a dare. It is a reminder that there is a deeper well of feeling and suspense available when you commit to showing the world as jagged as it is. The reference to The Boxcar Children is a reminder of the strange comfort children find in building their own little shelters. That mix, danger and invention, pity and pride, is what I missed here.
Still, I do not doubt that Dan Kay cares about these characters. The tenderness is not fake. The idea that love can become a shield is not wrong. And in Grace and Regina he has two leads who can carry more than the movie asks of them. Their work is the reason to see What We Hide if you want to see it. They look at each other as sisters do. They argue like sisters do. They huddle on a couch and dream of a tomorrow that will not ask quite so much of them. That part is true enough to hold onto.
I came away disappointed that the film brushes past the deeper corners of the opioid crisis. I came away frustrated that so many scenes felt like versions of better scenes in other movies. I also came away grateful for the young actors who give you enough feeling to keep you with them. What We Hide wants to make you cry and then reassure you. It does the first part now and then. It never quite earns the second. If it had trusted the impact of its own premise, if it had let fear and place and silence play a larger role, I think it could have found a sharper edge. As it stands, it is a gentle story about two girls holding each other up in a storm that never looks as dark as it really is.
Maybe that sounds harsher than I intend. Maybe you will see it and feel that the softness is the point. You will not be wrong. I can only tell you what it felt like to me, sitting there, watching Spider count dollars on a kitchen counter and Jessie practice a lie so she can pass through another school day without alerting an adult. I felt for them. I just wanted the film around them to be as brave as they were.
