Sundance review: 'Hot Water' puts a frazzled mother and her troubled son on a comic road trip, with Lubna Azabal giving a masterclass in barely concealing her stress

Writer-director Ramzi Bashour’s road-trip movie “Hot Water” doesn’t break much new ground in the cinematic depiction of mothers and sons — but it finds sufficient wit and wisdom in the interplay of the two characters at its center.

Lubna Azaval (“Incendies”) stars as Layal, who’s fighting off some major stress. She’s an Arabic language professor at the University of Indiana, dealing with entitled students who want their justly deserved bad grades changed. She’s recently stopped smoking, and taken to eating oranges as a substitute. Her mother in Beirut has had a fall, and her sister calls regularly with updates. And she’s learned that her 19-year-old son, Daniel (Daniel Zolghadri), is being expelled from another high school — this time for fighting with a player on a rival hockey team.

Exasperated, her only solution for handling Daniel is having him live with his father, Anton (Gabe Fazio), in Santa Cruz, California. The plan is for Layal to drive with Daniel to a midpoint in Colorado — but when Anton calls to tell her he can’t do that, she must make the entire drive with Daniel to California.

What Bashour gives us next is a mostly light-hearted road trip, in which mother and son appreciate the sights on winding two-lane highways. They have some interesting encounters, with a free-spirited nudist (Dale Dickey, always delightful) and a scruffy hitchhiker, but the focus is on the softening of tensions between Layal and Daniel.

The best thing about “Hot Water” is Azabal’s performance, as she finds the fragments of humor and heartbreak in her understandably wound-up character. Azabal makes Layal the most relatable mom who ever found herself at the end of her rope.

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‘Hot Water’

★★★

Screening in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Not rated, but probably R for language, some nudity and some drug use. Running time: 97 minutes; in English and some scenes in French and Arabic, with subtitles.

The film will screen again: Saturday, Jan. 24, 9 a.m., Redstone Cinemas 1, Park City; Sunday, Jan. 25, 5:30 p.m., Broadway Centre Cinemas 3, Salt Lake City; Thursday, Jan. 29, 9 p.m., The Yarrow, Park City; Saturday, Jan. 31, Holiday Village 3, Park City. Also screening on Sundance’s web portal, Thursday through Sunday, Jan. 29 to Feb. 1.