Novocaine (2025) Everybody Hurts in this surprisingly good action thriller
“And the night, the night is yours alone”
Any film that commences with “Everybody Hurts” by REM over the opening credits that quickly dissolve into a fade to black and then a Groundhog Day style close-up of a morning alarm clock about to rouse our chief protagonist from his slumbers, gets my immediate attention (“When your day is long. And the night, the night is yours alone”) and now “Nathan Caine” (Jack Quaid) is dropping his false teeth into a glass on a bedside table before gingerly stepping into and out of a shower, wiping the condensation from a bathroom mirror and seeing a reflection of a tired and downbeat man who’s now suited and booted and departing for work (“When you’re sure you’ve had enough. Of this life, well hang on”). Hang on he does, stuck in the same old early morning commuter traffic, inching along, stopping and starting (“Don’t let yourself go. ’Cause everybody cries. Everybody hurts…sometimes”) as he listens to the radio or perhaps a motivational tape on his disability, warning against letting his physical ailments hold him back and that he’s “here to win” and quickly here at work, the first to arrive at the bank, the first to flick on the artificial lights against the clear and natural light of a bright and early morning and the first of the staff to walk past the artificial Christmas tree in this artificial world under the unnatural light of a perfectly natural morning…
(“Sometimes everything is wrong. Now it’s time to sing along”).
We cut to a revolving set of images that constitute Nathan’s life and existence: a Band Aid box, erasers atop every single one of a vast array of pencils on his desk and replicating a feature of his home inside his office at work, half or three quarters of a tennis ball hiding the sharp corner of a desk. To explain why would be getting ahead of ourselves as first a thoroughly lost looking Nathan stands beside a far more eager and upbeat manager of the bank of which he’s deputy manager of and on “Christmas Bonus Day”, their busiest day of a year soon to be coming to an end, as “Sherry Margrave” (Amber Midthunder) arrives at work, late, freewheeling, free spirited and lost in her own world. Sherry’s green headphones atop her head are as obvious as her lax attitude to arriving midway through a meeting in the middle of the bank on it’s busiest day, and as obvious as Nathan being unable to tear his eyes away from this vision of beauty arriving late for a meeting he’s barely a part of, despite his lofted position.
Next we find Nathan with a customer, a valued customer, perhaps even a family friend of sorts as Nathan is clearly as spiritually broken as the much older man, customer and friend, sat opposite him. Cutting between the two men, Nathan is clearly torn between his duty to the bank and the “foreclosure” looming large in the future of the man sitting opposite him mourning the death of his wife of half a century and although he’s unable to stave off the inevitable, he promises to withhold any action by the bank until after the Christmas holidays. It may not save the man’s family store he explains empathetically, but it may safeguard the family home for the broken man who thanks Nathan as he begins to leave his office with a parting shot and “She brought the sunshine into my life”.
Lost in thought and staring at a clay model of two small figures intertwined in a loving embrace, we now find Nathan making fresh coffee in the staff room of the bank as he’s gently prodded in the back by Sherry. Startled, he pours boiling hot coffee all over his hands but yet, doesn’t cry out in pain or seek an immediate remedy. In fact, he’s rather embarrassed to have jumped at her playful nudge as Sherry now bubbles over with profuse apologies as she tries to roll up the sleeve of his shirt to attend to the scalding burns on his hand and arm, revealing the faintest hint of the base of a much larger tattoo. The awkwardness of the scene is broken as his wristwatch chimes with a timed alarm (a running theme of the longer film) before we cut to Nathan in his office applying cream to the incredibly painful looking burns on his hand. With Sherry arriving at his office and standing in the doorway, she profusely apologises again as she worries for both his injured hand and the fact she must surely be “nearly fired” for scalding the deputy manager and can she offer to take Nathan out to lunch as a way of apologising once more? He immediately and eagerly says yes before equally immediately making an excuse and declining her offer. As Sherry departs, Nathan casts his eye over the paperwork of his earlier client and seeing the driving licence of the customer’s deceased wife and life partner for half a century, bolts for the door of his office and catching Sherry in the middle of the corridor, agrees to her offer of lunch. “Looking forward to it” he enthuses with a beaming smile, before rebuking himself under his breath and “Don’t say it too loud”.
Following an overhead shot of the Padres baseball stadium that roots us firmly in the city of San Diego, we cut to the inside of a diner and after Nathan orders a simple vanilla milkshake, Sherry begs and pleads with the waitress that they still have a portion left of their famous cherry pie. With their orders taken, smiles abound on both sides of the table as Sherry eagerly wants to know more about the “socially awkward” loner sitting opposite her. She gently teases the man who’s first in and last out of the bank every day as Nathan smiles at their frank and open conversation. No girlfriend he confirms and nor is he dating and now with his milkshake before him, he cannot be more smitten with the young lady opposite him bursting with orgasmic noises at how delicious the cherry pie is as she insists, over and over again, that he simply must taste it. “I can’t” he eventually explodes, before apologising to a perplexed Sherry, and “I can’t have any pie. I have a genetic disorder — congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis — CIPA. It affects my nervous system and it makes it so I can’t feel pain” before further explaining that he can’t feel whether something is hot or cold and he can’t eat solid foods for fear of biting off and swallowing his own tongue. “You’re a Superhero!” explodes Sherry in sheer joy as Nathan continues to make light of his condition with stories of his youth and after being warned of a life expectancy of only 25 years, he’s “still kicking”.
Slowly but surely gaining Nathan’s trust and that she’ll watch his every move, Sherry, eventually, persuades a very reluctant Nathan to break his own code of personal conduct by taking a small bite of her cherry pie as it’s the “best cherry pie on the west coast”. After slowly and very carefully chewing before swallowing, he mimics he orgasmic reaction before exclaiming “THIS IS PIE?”, before Sherry has a question of her own:
“What are you doing later tonight?”
And there you have the opening 10 minutes of Novacaine.
All I’ll add in closing is that I somewhat reluctantly watched this at the behest of my beautiful son who liked what he saw at the cinema in opening week, and I’m pleased he twisted my arm. It’s silly popcorn fun that had me laughing and smiling before the catharsis of a pleasing ending and in between you have an off kilter love story from two stellar central performances: Jack Quaid as the impervious to pain quiet Superhero and gamer, and Amber Midthunder, recovering from a childhood of abuse and bumping around the social services of fostering and adoption, to now living on the sunnier side of life.
Well worth 110 minutes of your life with a bowl of popcorn and someone you love to share it with.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon