Daruma – Review
Daruma is the kind of indie that whispers rather than shouts. It’s a road movie, yes, but one where the journey is made through awkward silences, hesitant bonds, and a battered sense of duty that grows like a slow burn.
Patrick is a wheelchair user, a war vet surviving on habit and booze, his home and soul in disrepair until two social workers deliver a curveball: a four-year-old daughter, Camilla who needs a guardian.
The payment of $4,000 a month makes it toxic but tempting. Rather than magically morphing into Father of the Year, Patrick’s denial runs deep. That’s when he strikes an uneven alliance with his neighbour, Robert, a double-arm amputee whose sharp demeanour hides a bruised soul. Their reluctant cross-country trek becomes the emotional engine of the film.
The road-trip clichés are there, but Daruma sidesteps them with lived-in detail and quiet authenticity. Patrick doesn’t find redemption in a montage. He blunders. He snaps. He tries and fails. And somehow, that messiness, those unglamorous failures, are what feels most human.
Visually, it’s unflashy but deliberate. The motels, diners and back roads feel lived-in, giving the film a texture of impermanence. It’s a film that trusts its actors, and they repay that trust.
Tobias Forrest’s Patrick is abrasive, broken, but achingly real. He’s a proper asshole, you want to shake him, but also understand why he might half-hope he fails.
John W. Lawson’s Robert is a match made in curmudgeonly heaven: a man who watches others pity him and pushes back, fiercely. You sense the fragility underneath.
Victoria Scott as Camilla is unexpectedly the glue, not sickly sweet, but smart, unfiltered, lively. She shifts the dynamic in a way that feels grounded.
Abigail Hawk as Anna, the friendly furniture store assistant, offers a rare gentleness and an equally rare reaction when that gentleness is rejected.
The film doesn’t throw in big gestures. It lets small moments matter: a midnight wandering, a windshield begrudgingly fixed, the falter in a look. There’s authenticity in the casting. Forrest and Lawson both live with the realities their characters do which gives every scene a weight that feels grounded.
Flawed, slow to warm, Daruma is a small film with a stubborn kind of power. It doesn’t set out to inspire or uplift, but to show lives in motion – messy, unresolved, but real. By the time the credits roll, what lingers isn’t a big emotional payoff, but the quiet conviction that sometimes survival itself is enough of a story.
On digital 1 September from Miracle Media
