The Most Underrated Movie Of 2025 Is A Disturbing And Relevant Future Classic

The word tragedy is often used to refer to something for which the word "sad" would do. Perhaps that's because it's not all that easy to define tragedy, though it seems fair to say that it often involves a sense of lost potential — that something good and pure has been needlessly squandered. "Sovereign," a thriller starring Nick Offerman and Dennis Quaid, isn't just "sad" but heartrendingly tragic in a way that it doesn't telegraph going in. It's an unmissable experience.

"Sovereign" was written and directed by Christian Swegal, who began working on the script after one of his family members was drawn into the world of anti-government conspiracies and experienced major mental health issues. The film is also based on the perpetrators of the real-life 2010 West Memphis police shootings, in which 45-year-old Jerry Kane Jr. and his 16-year-old son, Joseph, opened fire on police after being pulled over. Prior to this horrific event, Jerry had become immersed in the Sovereign Citizen movement, a fringe extreme right-wing ideology, and had indoctrinated his son with those same noxious ideas.

Going into "Sovereign," then, you might well expect Swegal to embark on an exploration of socio-political conditions in the United States through the lens of Kane and his twisted ideology. Indeed, many reviews for this shockingly overlooked film tout it as an experience akin to "staring into a national wound." But "Sovereign" is so much more than that. Swegal has created a poignant, sensitive tragedy that has far more to say about parenthood and the precious and desperately fragile nature of father-son relationships than it does about right-wing extremism. It's this sneak attack on our emotions that makes "Sovereign" such an unforgettable and haunting watch, as well as easily one of the best movies of 2025.

In 2025, Nick Offerman received praise for his performance in "Death By Lightning," a star-studded Netflix miniseries geared towards American history fans. But his real triumph was "Sovereign," in which he plays fanatical single father Jerry Kane. Jerry has become subsumed by the ideology of the Sovereign Citizen movement and travels the United States giving talks on this woefully misguided belief system, which essentially boils down to the idea that those born on U.S. soil are only bound by common law. Since its rise in the 1970s, the ideology has basically produced a group of extreme libertarians who refuse to pay taxes and perceive law enforcement as illegitimate.

This is the ostensible focus of "Sovereign," in which we see how Jerry has also spent years indoctrinating his teen son Joe (as played by Jacob Tremblay). The pair live in a home that's soon to be foreclosed upon, all of which Jerry views with indifference, promising Joe that they're safe as long as they don't invite the authorities into the house. Immediately, then, the film seems more interested not in parsing the belief system itself but in how Jerry is failing his son by not preparing him for the real world. Instead, he's filled Joe's head with poisonous ideas that've made him an outsider before he's been allowed to explore the world on his own terms.

Tremblay is arguably the secret weapon here. While Offerman is firing on all cylinders, the young actor's subtle performance conveys Joe's faint wariness of his father's beliefs while simultaneously projecting his deep idolization of Jerry. Joe is worried about their future, but he's also enamored of his father simply because, well, he's his dad. That, not the buffoonish ideology, is the key to "Sovereign."

While Jerry and Joe Kane travel the country giving talks on the Sovereign Citizen Movement, Dennis Quaid's Police Chief John Bouchart supervises his son Adam (Thomas Mann) as he undergoes his introduction to law enforcement. We learn that the older Bouchart has put a lot of pressure on Adam throughout his life via scenes where his wife urges John to go easier on their son, who has just become a father himself. All the while you're waiting for "Sovereign" to make obvious points about the toxic nature of extremism and revel in laying bare the terrible ideas of its misguided protagonist, the movie is revealing itself to be a story about fatherhood.

As things progress, the political stuff recedes even further, and once we learn that Jerry descended into his harmful ideology following a personal tragedy, the whole Sovereign Citizen aspect almost becomes unimportant. This is then bolstered  when we see how Quaid's upstanding counterpart to Jerry can fail his own son, too. By the end of the movie, both Chief Bouchart and us, the audience, are hit with a hammer blow of a realization that children really are a blessing of the most precious kind, and we abandon our obligation to them at our ultimate peril.

That's a heck of a lot more interesting than a film whose only message is "extremism = bad." Still, despite that fact, there was not a huge audience for this movie. "Sovereign" did hit Hulu in November 2025 following a limited theatrical release the previous summer, but like Jerry's responsibility to his son, it went mostly overlooked. Thankfully, that's one tragedy that you can still put right by watching Christian Swegal's outstanding drama right now.