Movie Review: 'Cold Wallet' is a Solid Modern Thriller

Cold Wallet

Directed by Cutter Hodierne

Written by Cutter Hodierne, John Hibey

Starring Raul Castillo, Josh Brener, Melonie Diaz, Tony Cavalero

Release Date February 28th, 2025

Published February 24th, 2025

One thing I cannot do is find any sympathy for people who bring about their own bad circumstances. For instance, I have no time for people who die climbing Mount Everest. If you’d like to not die on the side of a frozen mountain, choose not to go. Pretty simple. I feel the same way about people who lose money in crypto scams. If you want to avoid losing money in Bitcoin or whatever, don’t get into Bitcoin or Crypto. I’ve managed to not get into crypto for its entire existence, thus I have not lost money on it. Pretty simple.

I mention this because the movie Cold Wallet was up against a lot to get me to care about people who lost money in a cryptocurrency scam. The movie pulls off quite a trick because it never bothers to ask you to like its main characters. By the time you reach the end of the movie and the main character is met with a moral crisis, it’s surprisingly compelling, even if you have no idea what the character is about to do via some sort of internet exchange of currency.

Cold Wallet stars Raul Castillo as Billy. Billy has bet everything on a new coin exchange that he’s convinced is going to make him a millionaire. He’s so confident in this investment that he has begun the process of buying a house. He’s even gotten his best friend, Dom (Tony Cavallero), to give him money to invest. Thus, when this sure thing completely fails, Billy is so devastated that he’s willing to do anything to get his investment back.

Via his friendship with another crypto expert and professional hacker, Eva (Melonie Diaz), Billy finds out that the man behind the crypto exchange, Charles Hegel (Josh Brener), has faked his death in order to get away with all of currency. The only chance that Billy, Dom, and Eva have to get their money back is to track down Hegel and steal back the Coin. Lucky for them, Hegel is holed up not far from where they are and, because everyone thinks he’s dead, Hegel is not surrounded by security or hangers on.

Hegel will be all alone in his mansion until he can sneak away to some island in the Caribbean to spend his ill-gotten money. From there, Cold Wallet becomes a home invasion thriller with no good guys, only criminals trying to out-criminal each other. Billy, Dom, and Eva claim to have altruistic motives, returning the stolen money to those who were ripped off, but the movie smartly uses Hegel to foment the drama by turning the trio against each other, inviting each to the chance to take all of the money for themselves.

This premise really works. It’s a lot of fun, especially watching actor Josh Brener, going full on sociopath, using his smarmy charms to snake his way between the trio, sewing seeds of doubt and confusion while scheming a way to sneak out of his confines. Brener relishes being as evil as possible, pragmatically making the case for each of his three captors to not trust their friends. Brener sucks the air out of scenes, creating tension by appealing to the darkest fantasies and fears of his captors.

The filmmakers reduce the crypto stuff to the bare minimum of jargon while cleverly telling the audience that it boils down to passwords and memory sticks. The wallets are on the memory sticks and passwords are needed to access them. I’m sure reality is far more complicated than that, but, for the purposes of suspense, turning the titular Cold Wallet, into a classically Hitchcockian MacGufffin, the thing everyone in a thriller is desperate to possess, the suspense becomes easy to follow, no matter your experience with crypto.

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