The real Amanda Ogle received a tow bill for $21,634. Then she made a movie about it.
The film changed the number to $273. She is living out of a 1991 Toyota Camry on the streets of Seattle. She has just landed a job at a veterinary office. She needs the car to do the job.
She does not have $273. The tow company keeps the car, and Amanda spends the next year of her life trying to get it back.
That is the story of Tow, which opened in select theaters yesterday, March 20. Rose Byrne plays Amanda.
She also produced the film. It is rated R, runs 1 hour 45 minutes, and is distributed by Roadside Attractions and Vertical. It is based on a true story.
What Happened To The Real Amanda Ogle?
Amanda Ogle was an unhoused Seattle woman living in her car when it was towed. The bill the towing company presented her to get it back was $21,634.
The film dramatizes her fight against Kaplan Towing, the bureaucratic system surrounding the impound process, and the legal maze she had to navigate largely on her own.
She eventually took the towing company to court representing herself. She won. She went to the lot to retrieve her car and found it had already been sold at auction. She kept fighting.
$273 is a real number that real people sometimes can’t cover. $21,634 reads like a punchline. The film apparently decided the story worked better with an amount that felt immediately unfair rather than immediately surreal.
Who Is Working On Tow?
Director Stephanie Laing, who directed Irreplaceable You and has extensive television credits including Veep, shot the film from a screenplay by Jonathan Keasey and Brant Boivin.
It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2025 and was picked up by Roadside Attractions and Vertical for theatrical release.
The film is structured as what critics have described as a bureaucratic odyssey. Amanda crashes at a church homeless shelter run by Barbara, played by Octavia Spencer.
She meets comrades at the shelter including Nova, played by Demi Lovato, and Denise, played by Ariana DeBose.
The shelter also has a resident sociopath played by Lea DeLaria. Amanda eventually connects with a young nonprofit lawyer named Kevin, played by Dominic Sessa, who helps her build a case.
Elsie Fisher, who was so good as a teenager in Eighth Grade, plays Amanda’s estranged daughter in Utah, who Amanda maintains contact with through phone calls that represent her one thin thread of connection to another life.
Simon Rex and Corbin Bernsen round out the cast, with Rex playing a tow truck company employee and Bernsen playing the lawyer for the towing company.
What Critics Are Saying
The film’s critical reception has been mixed-to-warm throughout its run, with one consistent through line. Rose Byrne’s performance is the reason to see it.
At Tribeca, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film “sends a powerful message about how many of us have more in common with a person sleeping in a car than we do the billionaires we’ve been conditioned to admire.”
IndieWire’s review was more skeptical, giving it a B- and noting it “comes dangerously close to being crass poverty porn” — though the critic conceded good intentions and strong performances.
Since the theatrical release, the reviews have been more generous. MovieWeb called Byrne “phenomenal” and described Tow as “the remarkable true story of a homeless woman’s fight to recover her illegally impounded car from vile lawyers and feckless bureaucrats,” saying it “strikes at the heart of America’s most public, yet casually ignored epidemic.”
Awards Radar called it “a big hearted true story anchored by Rose Byrne.” One critic on Rotten Tomatoes described it as “funny, sad, frustrating, empathetic, and quietly enraging, often within the same scene.”
The criticism where it exists tends to land on the script rather than the performance.
The film is an elongated anecdote, it covers a year of Amanda’s life and never quite builds beyond its own premise.
It is honest about her flaws without fully reckoning with the possibility that her obsession with the car is itself part of what keeps her stuck.
The car is her dignity, critics note, but the film doesn’t interrogate whether that framework is helping or trapping her.
Byrne’s performance comes out above all of it. One critic called it “acting alchemy,” the transformation of a character you don’t particularly like into someone whose humanity you can’t stop watching.
Why Byrne Is Everywhere Right Now
This is the most concentrated stretch of serious dramatic work Rose Byrne has done. She shot Tow and A24’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You within a similar window, and both films are landing in the same season.
Her performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You earned her a Best Actress nomination at the 2026 Oscars.
She is also returning to Broadway this month in Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, meaning she has a film in theaters, an Oscar nomination, and a Broadway opening all in the same stretch of weeks.
Tow is the quieter of the two films. It does not have an A24 platform or a major awards campaign behind it. But it is the one that strips away everything the other film has, the middle-class setting, the sharpness of the satire, and replaces it with something more stripped down.
A woman, a car, a bill she can’t pay. Byrne has built a career on characters who are difficult and prickly, from the upscale boss’s wife in Bridesmaids to the unraveling mother in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Amanda Ogle is both of those things with nothing left to protect her.
The look the film gives her says everything: blonde hair in a paisley pink kerchief with a plastic flower tucked in, leather jacket, dark pink sunglasses, a snarling scowl of defiance.
Whether the film around her is fully worthy of the performance is a question critics continue to debate. Whether the performance itself is worth seeing is not.
Tow is in select theaters now.
