Solid Rock Trust

Let’s go to work…Solid Rock Trust is a heist thriller with a difference, the debut of writer/director Rick Ives, who has enviable editorial credits on The Mandolorian, Avengers Endgame and Guardian of the Galaxy Vol 3. Ives has balanced his own personal budgets to make his own micro-budget feature, Solid Rock Trust, and with an original, innovative and intense conceit a la Locke or Memento, it’s something of a blast for thrill-seeking action fans with twists from soup to nuts.

Koko Marshall is the star here; she’s rarely off screen as Maddie, a hacker who is organising a bank heist from an abandoned warehouse; it’s not quite abandoned, but we’ll circle back. Switching phones, voices and characters with the aid of some snazzy tech, she’s not only moving various encroaching figures around the bank with a series of carefully timed calls, but also negotiating with the forces of the law as they get wise to how the heist is going down. The goal is a thumb drive in a bank safe; it’s been loaded with the intel required to deliver lottery winnings. This is a super-stressful situation, and when things start to go south, Maddie has to Die Hard her way out of trouble in ingenious, intricate fashion. ‘This is a country sized casino, and the house always wins’ says Maddie, and there’s considerable evidence that she’s going to have to beat the odds to survive.

If you’ve seen shorts like John Maclean’s brilliant Pitch Black Heist, starring Michael Fassbender, you’ll know that the humble heist movie can be a fertile ground for creative talent as well as a great calling card. As with another genre classic debut, Reservoir Dogs, we see very little of the heist itself, just a few security camera images on screens; we’re very much in Maddie’s position, trying to work out what’s happening based on conflicting spurts of information. Ives handles his single location brilliantly, with a restless camera and rigorous editing technique that makes the mood changes jar and the dramatic moments pop with tension; there’s an abrupt moment when Maddie gets disturbed by a couple of visitors to the warehouse that multiples the jeopardy involved. In scenes like this, Marshall and Ives seem to be working in lockstep to create a sympathetic, empathetic heroine fighting for survival in a dangerous world; you might come for the ingenious novelty of the single-room setting, but Solid Rock Trust delivers as a tight, balls-to–the wall thriller.

Big, highly publicised movies hardly need critical approval or not; a film like Solid Rock Trust absolutely depends on getting the word out there that this is a minor gem that genre fans should seek out and deserves a cult following. Hopefully this will have a great run on streaming; anchored by a superb performance from Koko Marshall, and controlled with steely elan by Rick Ives, this is a spiky little movie that delivers more thrills than most blockbusters; check it out if you can find it!