I Watched ‘Indemnity,’ The Lowest-Grossing Theatrical Release Of 2022. It Wasn’t Bad.

It wasn’t great, either, but maybe that’s okay?

In late 2006, the now seemingly defunct website CHUD.com ran an article headlined “What if They Released a Movie and Nobody Came?” The movie in question was Zyzzyx Road and what was supposed to be an under-the-radar release to satisfy a SAG requirement quickly became a story picked up by Entertainment Weekly and other outlets. The reason: Zyzzyx Road earned a mere $30, making it the lowest-grossing film in history. There were a few other factors contributing to the surge in interest in a low-budget thriller, including the casting of Katherine Heigl, a magnet for schadenfreude in the high-Gawker ’00s. But $30 is a pretty astounding number no matter who stars in a movie.

There may never be another Zyzzyx Road, but there will always be movies that play briefly to thin audiences for whatever reason, usually to check off the “this movie will be released theatrically” box in the business arrangements that made it possible in the first place. And there’s an excellent chance that you’ll never hear of said movies, which tend to make week-long appearances in New York and/or Los Angeles. And, even if you live in those cities, you might not notice them as they slip in and out of theaters with little fanfare beyond a spot in the listings and, maybe, a review in a newspaper still interested in covering the fullness of the film scene.

The year’s not over yet, but I decided to have a look at this year’s least-popular theatrical release to date to see what lay at the end of the spectrum opposite Top Gun: Maverick, the year’s most popular film thus far, grossing over $716 million dollars and selling more than 78,000 tickets, according to the box office site The Numbers. It’s there I found Indemnity, a film that, per the same site, sold 37 tickets for a haul of $347. (Which, hey, at least that’s over 10 Zyzzyx Roads.)

What leads to a movie enticing so few? Indemnity opened on four screens on February 11, a week dominated by the new releases Death on the Nile and Marry Me. But, to be fair, they didn’t have to work that hard to dominate the charts. February is traditionally a slow time at the movies and 2022 was no exception. It was distributed by Magnet Releasing, which has a long history of putting out compelling international genre films like The Host and 13 Assassins. But it’s also put out a fair number of space-filling international genre programmers and nothing about Indemnity, from its title to its trailer, suggested it would offer viewers anything they hadn’t seen before.

There’s some truth to that, but it’s not the entire story. Helmed by the debuting writer-director Travis Taute, Indemnity is  at heart a riff on The Fugitive with a faint dusting of science fiction. Jarrid Geduld stars as Theo Abrams, a firefighter still reeling from an assignment that left some of his friends and co-workers dead. But when Theo’s journalist wife Angela (Nicole Fortuin) comes to suspect there’s more to the story, Theo quickly finds himself in over his head as he’s accused of a crime he didn’t commit (or maybe doesn’t remember committing).

It’s a story we’ve seen before, but not one we’ve seen play out in Cape Town, South Africa or in Afrikaans, the language used for most of the dialogue, and that unfamiliar setting gives the film a charge—at least for viewers outside of South Africa, a country often used to sub in for other places but which rarely gets to play itself in films released in North America. The pacing drags down as the film keeps pausing to explain every twist and turn, but Taute is a sure-handed director and the hand-to-hand action scenes, though a little transparently choreographed, are well done, with Geduld doing much (if not all) of the stunt work.

You could, in other words, do a lot worse. But the handful of reviews Indemnity picked up didn’t create a sense of urgency. Though someone named “Barbarella” writing for the apparently still-existent Ain’t It Cool News was pretty enthusiastic, Guy Lodge’s Variety review praised Geduld but lamented the film’s length and pace. In the New York Times, Devika Girish noted its “grungy physicality that feels rare in today’s plastic, CGI-driven actionverse” while also describing its script as “a patchwork of tropes.” It’s a positive review, albeit not the sort of positive review that moves the needle. The Los Angeles Times review falls somewhere in between Lodge and Girish, while noting some of the same positive and negative qualities. And since it was written by friend-of-The Reveal Noel Murray (and because he’s the only other person I know who’s seen Indemnity) I decided to talk to him about it.

Keith Phipps:  Hey Noel, if I told you I watched the lowest-grossing theatrically released movie of the year and it was something you reviewed, what would you guess I watched?

Noel Murray: I couldn’t begin to guess! I write a weekly review round-up for VOD and streaming titles for The Los Angeles Times and some of those movies also get a small theatrical release but I don’t always know which ones. I’m on pins and needles here. Hit me.

Keith: [Drumroll…] It’s Indemnity. Which brings me to my next question: Do you remember Indemnity?

Noel: I could Google it but I’m going to play fair here and say no. Reviewing five to six movies a week — very few of which are on anyone’s year-end awards radar — means that a lot of these drop out of my memory pretty quickly. Especially when they have a completely unmemorable name. Which one is Indemnity?

Keith: It’s a South African thriller about a firefighter accused of killing his wife. Does that shake anything loose?

Noel: Okay, yes. The details are hazy but I feel like I probably reviewed that early in the year, and… I think I kinda liked it? I’m going to keep playing fair and I won’t look up my review (yet), but that sounds like the kind of genre film where I’d be impressed with the specificity of the setting, the cleverness of the premise and maybe a few of the action set pieces. Also, isn’t there a science-fiction-y element? Like, the wife was a journalist about to expose some secret government experiment to make super-soldiers or the like? Am I on the right track here?

Keith: Very good. It’s funny, all the reviews cite the same strengths and weaknesses:  too much exposition, bad pacing, strong action and a neat premise. And you’re remembering it pretty well. You were mixed, edging toward positive. The New York Times was mostly positive. Variety was mixed negative. I mostly liked it. But I found myself both wondering why so few saw it and what would lead moviegoers to seek it out among other options. It played on four screens but to mostly empty theaters. You cover this beat. Does that surprise you?

Noel: Oh, not at all. A movie like that would need some really strong reviews to get people out of the house. I don’t know what was in theaters back in February — I did just look up my review, so I know it was February — but this isn’t the kind of film that many folks would actively choose to spend money to see, I don’t think. It’s more something you’d watch if you stumbled upon it. It’d be perfect for one of the premium cable movie channels. I’m still a cable subscriber and on a regular basis I record and take a look at movies that are on Showtime or Starz or whatever simply because I don’t recognize the title and I’m like, “What the hell is that?” And if I watched Indemnity on a whim on cable, I’d probably feel a lot like I did when I reviewed it: Well, that wasn’t great but it wasn’t a waste of time either. Some interesting stuff in there.

Noel might be onto something here. Maybe more moviegoers didn’t go see Indemnity in theaters because theaters no longer feel like the natural home for this sort of action movie. Streaming, however, is another story altogether. I watched Indemnity on Hulu (where it’s available both in Afrikaans and in an English dub; I went with the original) while folding laundry and it made a fine accompaniment. And while I don’t have numbers for streaming services, which are guarded like state secrets, I suspect it will find a more hospitable environment alongside the many other low- to mid-budget action movies (most of which feature past-their-prime American stars) that dominate Hulu’s catalog and the catalogs of virtually every streaming service.

It’s tough for an outsider to figure out the economics of the streaming world, but all signs suggest that having a deep catalog, even if it’s a catalog filled with unfamiliar, seemingly interchangeable titles, is considered a key to success. Hulu’s algorithm suggested I might also enjoy Crime Story, a 2021 thriller starring Richard Dreyfuss and Mira Sorvino (both Oscar winners), Enforcement (a Danish crime thriller), or Last Survivors (a post-apocalyptic thriller starring Alicia Silverstone). I’ve never heard of any of these but, you know what? The algorithm might be right. I didn’t love Indemnity, but I didn’t mind it either. Besides, there’s almost always laundry to fold and you can’t do that while watching TÁR or Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, can you?