The Wheel is not an easy film to watch, but it feels like an important one. The movie focuses on two couples, one who are renting out an Airbnb and one who is staying in it, both of which are deeply flawed. These four are well-developed with layers upon layers of issues, and two characters are actively horrible people; their Airbnb business arrangement leads to major blow-outs in each relationship. The results are often painful, with enough bitterness to overwhelm any taste, but the film slowly unravels the depths of honest emotion and psychological truths hidden beneath the contempt, helping the viewer understand where all this neurotic anger comes from.

As such, The Wheel becomes a test of empathy, the kind of film that, by its powerful ending, will interrogate the audience's ability to empathize with others. It's a test of tolerance, patience, and understanding, one which almost acts as a Rorschach inkblot that reflects the viewer's humanity (or lack thereof) right back at them. Like a mirror to the soul, you may not like what you see in The Wheel, but by the end of this difficult, fascinating film, you just might know yourself a little better. Steve Pink directed the movie from Trent Atkinson's script and talks to us about the cast, the process, and how to create empathy and understanding with flawed characters.

Steve Pink Gets Dramatic With The Wheel

Amber Midthunder and Taylor Gray in The Wheel
Quiver Distribution

Pink is an interesting choice to direct The Wheel (which has gotten rave reviews ever since becoming an official selection of TIFF). After years of acting, Pink wrote and produced two iconic late '90s films, Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity before directing the comedies Accepted, About Last Night, and the two excellent Hot Tub Time Machine movies. While there is obviously an emotional depth to these films (especially in the director's frequent collaborations with John Cusack), nothing is quite as intense and emotionally relentless as The Wheel.

"I always joke that [his producer] Josh simply didn't read my IMDb page before sending me the script," Pink tells us. "Because it was a challenge, because frankly no one, certainly in the studio system, isn't gonna give me a drama. Maybe from their point of view, they would have been right until I made this movie. It was a huge challenge for me to see if I could even pull off the drama, and was much more difficult than I thought, especially romantic drama. Part of me felt like, oh, yeah, they just don't tell jokes, right? And they just feel stuff?" he half-jokes.

Related: These Are the Saddest Romantic Movies of All Time

Pink certainly pulls off the romantic drama in The Wheel. With Atkinson's dialogue-heavy script in tow, he captures the dissolution of relationships and the frequent tragedy that is so inherent in love and human communication itself, even if it was a challenge (and may be for the viewer as well). "Really digging into the emotional perspectives of the characters and then trying to figure out how to capture all this complexity was a huge challenge."

Capturing the Emotions of Difficult Characters in The Wheel

Amber Midthunder lays down as Taylor Gray walks in The Wheel
Quiver Distribution

Bethany Anne Lind and Nelson Lee play Carly and Ben, a slightly older couple engaged to be married, while Taylor Gray and Amber Midthunder play Walker and Albee, a young couple who have actually been married for years, though they're in their mid-20s. Together, they form an intimate chamber drama in which small gestures and acidic barbs bring out the worst in each of them, flaws they each seem to be running from and repressing until Albee, like a bull-in-a-china-shop, angrily demolishes all pretensions and tears down each facade. "It was such an interesting script," Pink says, and elaborates:

Full of these people who, on the one hand, were very aware of their emotional lives, or how they felt about things, and then in other ways had huge blind spots. Like, Albee is very easily pointing out all these other people's problems, but she seems like she's just refusing to confront her own self-hatred. Ben acts like he's got not a care in the world, but he's not confronting the fact that he doesn't want to marry Carly, he's not in love with her the way she needs him to be. Carly obviously was in denial about the fact that maybe for her. Walker is in denial about the fact that his unconditional love for Albee's not going to solve her problems.

"So it's interesting," Pink says, "figuring out how to weave all of those things in and tell a story with very little resources in very short amount of time. It was a great experience. I'm glad it seems to be resonating with people, because I do feel a great empathy to the characters." Summoning empathy despite vehemently disliking someone's behavior is always a challenge, perhaps never more so than in the past decade of social media, political division, and echo chambers; some of us can't stand to empathize with our own family.

Amber Midthunder and the Test of Empathy

Amber Midthunder in a tub in The Wheel
Quiver Distribution

This is the test — can you find the humanity in these characters even when they frustrate or enrage you? Can you look past awful behavior and try to understand the hurt people who hurt people? "It's a pretty obvious thing to say, I guess, but I think if we all are more tuned in to our own flaws and shortcomings, we'll obviously have more compassion for others," Pink says, and by the end of The Wheel (with its revelatory, lengthy final shot), the viewer will likely be more tuned in to their own.

Related: Amber Midthunder Earns Universal Praise for Prey Performance

What helps sell this is Pink's innate skill (perhaps as a former actor) with his cast. "We talked constantly about it, before we shot and during, and even after when we were cutting," Pink tells us. Everyone wonderfully taps into their characters, but Midthunder stands out by definition as the boldest character in The Wheel, an emotional bulldozer of a human being who has so much trauma that it leaks out from her and damages everyone around her. Flowers practically wilt as she walks by. It's an uncompromising performance and decision, something Pink stuck to.

Amber Midthunder standing over Nelson Lee in The Wheel
Quiver Distribution

"She's experiencing a heightened emotional crisis," Pink says, "Amber was trying to find ways to portray her, and I was trying to find ways to express her, but the nice or softer moments that we shot actually felt fake. It was interesting, when we did things that made her seem nicer [...] it suddenly didn't seem like character at all. So then that made us really examine what would lead a person to be so outwardly hostile as a mode of behavior." Pink continues about their approach to Midthunder's difficult character, who is the main test of empathy in The Wheel:

We talked about the fact that she's at a place in her life where she doesn't know how to behave any other way. She is so distraught over the past pain and past trauma, and she's having an almost out-of-body experience in terms of who she is. She obviously is in a place where she feels no self-love at all, and feels not deserving of love at all. And she's trying to escape her circumstances, but she's also trying to escape herself. That's the journey she's on, and it was hard to avoid, it was always hard to soften or to figure out how to frame it in any other way. And Amber was so brave. I think it's my view that she's extremely brave to play a character like that.

Yes, Midthunder is incredible (as she was in Legion and in the upcoming Predator prequel Prey), navigating subtle emotional entry points into a character who is unremittingly hateful to everyone around her. However, how the viewer reacts to Albee in contrast to how they relate to the other characters might be part of the audience's test.

Forgiveness and Understanding Keep The Wheel Spinning

Amber Midthunder and Taylor Gray in The Wheel
Quiver Distribution

"I think we're generally harder on women who act that way than men," Pink says, addressing the interesting gender politics at play in The Wheel. "There are plenty of characters in cinema history who are men who are [expletives], who are not repentant or are just outright antiheroes [...] We don't have that same scrutinizing lens of saying 'I'm done with that person,' because I accept that they're a guy and guys act like that. So I think we're a little less forgiving of women in that way."

What we tolerate in people (and who we tolerate it from), and what distance we are willing to go in order to understand someone and recognize their reasoning, is a defining aspect of anyone's growth or emotional health. This quality is something The Wheel is adept at exposing in a viewer. Pink and Atkinson place their four main characters in a beautiful wooded area, engulfed almost exclusively in natural light and filmed exquisitely by cinematographer Bella Gonzales, and the forest becomes a proverbial battleground for emotional warfare. There are many casualties here, but what Pink does effectively in The Wheel is show the wounds, encouraging audiences to reveal their own and be on the lookout for others'.

From Quiver Distribution and Hurley Pickle, and produced by Josh Jason, Molly Gilula, Steve Pink, Trent Atkinson, Sean Crampton, Amber Midthunder, and Taylor Gray, The Wheel is now available to watch through YouTube, Google, Prime Video, and other PVOD services.