Film Review: Roofman 屋頂人 (2025) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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In "Roofman," Derek Cianfrance, a director whose previous films ("Blue Valentine," "The Place Beyond the Pines") have the emotional weight of a cinder block tied to your ankles, does something unexpected. He floats. He trades his usual somber grit for a tone so disarmingly sweet and surreal that you spend the first half-hour waiting for the other shoe to drop. The miracle of the film is that when it finally does, the sound it makes is not a crash, but a sigh.
The film tells the true story of Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum), a divorced Army veteran and aspiring engineer who, in the early 2000s, embarked on one of the most bizarre crime sprees in American history. His target wasn't a bank or an armored car. It was the roof. More specifically, the roofs of fast-food restaurants and retail stores across the Denver area. Manchester would cut a hole, descend after hours, and live there for weeks at a time, subsisting on baby food and store inventory, emerging only to crack the safes once the coast was clear.
Channing Tatum, an actor who has too often been asked to be merely a handsome slab of granite, is perfectly cast. He leans into his natural "gentle giant" energy, portraying Manchester not as a menace, but as a polite, meticulous man who just happens to enjoy drilling into McDonald's ceilings. He’s so unfailingly courteous to the oblivious employees working below him that you almost forget he’s committing a felony. Tatum understands that the key to the character is loneliness. This isn't a man driven by greed, but by a need for a strange kind of sanctuary. You find yourself rooting for a man who lives on Go-GURT and rides a mountain bike through a closed Toys "R" Us, because Tatum turns a potential caricature into a soulful, lonely protagonist.
The film’s secret weapon, however, is Kirsten Dunst. She plays Sarah, a store manager at a local pharmacy who has no idea that the quiet, helpful stranger who buys a single battery every Tuesday night is currently living 20 feet above her head in the stockroom. Dunst, with her eternally knowing eyes and weary smile, provides the emotional anchor. The chemistry between her and Tatum is so gentle, so achingly ordinary, that it grounds the film's more whimsical impulses. Their scenes together, played out in fluorescent-lit aisles and parking lots, are a quiet romance between two people who have given up on the idea of romance. When the inevitable "reveal" comes, it feels less like a gotcha moment and more like the logical, heartbreaking conclusion to a dream.
Cianfrance and his production designer deserve immense credit for the "store living" segments. Manchester's secret lair, constructed behind shelves of motor oil and paper towels, is rendered with a detail that is both whimsical and claustrophobic. It’s a sad, funny little kingdom made of stolen snacks and stolen time, a monument to the absurdity of trying to build a home inside a temple of American consumerism.
The film is a masterclass in tone management, even if it occasionally stumbles. The pacing drags a bit in the second act as the romance takes center stage, and the transition from the quiet, surreal comedy of the heists to the inevitable, screeching-tires police pursuit is jarring. You can almost hear the gears grinding as the story is forced to remember it’s about a fugitive.
But "Roofman" is a bizarre, "only in America" story that captures the strange intersection of crime, consumerism, and our desperate search for a place to call home. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the most human thing you can do is build a fort, even if it’s inside someone else’s store. (Neo, 2026)