Metacritic reviews

Throughout, the film is an idiosyncratic mediation on a pesky emotion that can simultaneously bond us and tear us apart. And with Pink and his exquisite cast behind The Wheel, the audience is in great hands.

With compelling performances from leads Amber Midthunder and Taylor Gray, it’s impossible not to be invested in where they end up.

The four main players are all excellent, with Amber Midthunder delivering particularly outstanding work that shows she is a young actor capable of great things.

The Wheel may not, well, reinvent the wheel. But in its expansive empathy, it delivers something that nevertheless feels new and surprising.

The story ends with an ambitiously staged sequence that reaches for another level of feeling, but it’s hard for anything to match the bruising depiction of Albee and Walker’s rough road to that point.

While the first half of the film struggles, the second half deftly explores the character dynamics in a tender way that makes it well worth the watch.

For all its formulaic faults, The Wheel is unusually astute about the ways some couples avoid the hard truths about each other because they’re afraid of ripping their whole lives apart.

Pink, a veteran TV director who takes a rather self-important “a film by” credit on what feels like a first feature (it’s his fifth), shows almost no intuition for how to block or shoot a scene, inserting songs where silence would have been more effective. His clumsiness leaves the actors looking slightly amateurish, despite the strong, vulnerable performances they deliver.

It’s messy and overly convoluted, but the ends do mostly justify the means.