June Squibb has been a working character actor for seventy years and never had a true lead role until this one, which is reason enough to watch Thelma even before you get to how funny it is. Writer-director Josh Margolin structures the film as a straight-faced parody of Mission: Impossible and the elder-action genre generally, complete with a slow-motion equipment-gathering montage that's mostly a walker, a phone, and a stubborn refusal to be condescended to by her own family.
The joke never comes at Thelma's expense — Margolin is careful to make her stubbornness the source of both the comedy and the emotional core, rather than a punchline about aging itself. Richard Roundtree, in his final screen role, plays her getaway-driver friend Ben with a warmth that makes their scooter chase sequences feel less like slapstick and more like two old friends refusing to let anyone tell them they're finished. Fred Hechinger, as the grandson dragged along for the ride, gets the film's quieter thread about generational guilt and how hard it is to watch someone you love lose a step.
An action-movie parody that turns a 93-year-old's stubbornness into the year's most unlikely thrill ride.
It's a small movie with a small budget and a premise that could have been a five-minute sketch, but Margolin stretches it into a surprisingly sturdy feature by treating the action-movie mechanics with total sincerity instead of camp. The scooter chase down a suburban sidewalk shouldn't work as a piece of tension, and it works anyway, because the film has spent enough time making you care whether Thelma gets her money back on her own terms.
Thelma was written, directed, and edited by Josh Margolin in his feature debut, inspired directly by a phone scam his own grandmother survived. June Squibb, then 94, performed a number of her own stunts, including several of the scooter sequences, in what became her first leading film role after decades of supporting work including her Oscar-nominated turn in Nebraska. The film also stars Fred Hechinger, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Malcolm McDowell, and Richard Roundtree. It runs 98 minutes and was produced by Bandwagon with Magnolia Pictures handling U.S. distribution.
Thelma premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 to strong reviews and was released theatrically that June. The film drew significant attention as one of the final screen appearances of Richard Roundtree, the Shaft star, who died in October 2023 before the film's release. Critics highlighted Squibb's performance as overdue recognition for an actress who had spent her career in supporting roles, and the film's specific take on elder-led action comedy was frequently compared favorably to broader entries in the aging-action-hero trend that also appeared that same year.
Squibb's performance ended up resonating well beyond opening weekend, earning her nominations for the Gotham Award and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Performance, plus a win at the Critics' Choice Super Awards for Best Actress in an Action Movie, a category that exists specifically because films like this one keep proving the action genre doesn't have an age limit. Thelma also turned into a genuine specialty-box-office success, grossing around $13 million on a shoestring budget, an unusually strong result for an indie comedy without a single recognizable franchise element attached to it. For a film built around the premise that nobody expects much from a 93-year-old woman, that underestimation turned out to be the whole point, on screen and at the box office alike.
