The first ten minutes of Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Asphalt City (2024) begins with Tye Sheridan’s Ollie Cross, a rookie EMT, awakening from a haze of disorientation and responding to a call involving a gunshot victim. The seasoned EMTs around him yell and berate him to leave the person with a shot foot and respond to the more serious critical victim. He’s rattled–this is his first time seeing a person shot–and his colleagues are frustrated. 

In comes seasoned veteran, Gene Rutkovsky (Sean Penn), who rushes by Ollie’s side and administers protocols and procedures. They hurry to the ambulance and as they ride through the streets of New York, they do everything they can to prevent the blood loss and keep the person awake. Soon Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold: Prelude plays, indicating that this poor man will soon ascend for the heavens, and the practices of Ollie and Gene are fruitless. Gene slowly accepts the reality; Ollie pleads for the victim to stay awake. Right as the track peaks the person dies, and Ollie and Gene are left exhausted and saddened, then proceed with tending to the next call.

Imagine that scene replayed, regurgitated for the next hour and fifty-five minutes and what you get is a miserable slog that leaves little room for redemption for anyone on screen. The plotless structure revolves around the daily routine of two New York EMTs answering call after call, encountering death, decay, dead dogs, stillborn children of heroin addicts, decomposing bodies, and so on that the film makes you accustomed as Gene to seeing the everyday horror of his job. Based on the book, Black Flies (the film’s original title when it competed at last year’s Cannes Film Festival), the book is loosely based on Shannon Burke’s small stint as a New York paramedic in the 90s. 

Subtlety is not in this film’s language, as the dynamic hand-held camera work by David Ungaro weaves, tracks, and bobs—following the duo to each call—immersing you in their minute-by-minute encounters. Sirens blare; bystanders yell and curse you out; Gene instructs orders to Ollie; Ollie panics and tries to keep up, never allowing his conscience to distract him from administering care. There’s no doubt paramedics deal with some of the most extreme cases of life-and-death situations, and perhaps this film is meant to strip away whatever shine or sheen to showcase the dark nature of their work. Yet the film is constantly fetishizing and grossly exploiting such circumstances. 

One case is where a man is having trouble breathing and being treated by Ollie and Gene while butchers casually slaughter sheep next to him. The editing constantly interjects this moment with sheep skinning and decapitation. Is it pertinent? No, but Sauvaire wants to show the stark contrast between something gruesome of everyday life and the last minutes of someone dying.

Or when Ollie takes away a violent pitbull from an injured child, only to have a nameless gang member shoot the dog senselessly. As if that’s not enough, that same dog carcass is used as a prank where Ollie’s colleagues, namely a caricature of a Brooklyn tough guy, Lafontaine (Michale Pitt), stuff it in his locker as a surprise. Asphalt City wants to shine a light on the grueling nature of being an EMT, yet it does nothing but rob them of their humanity. 

Penn as Gene Rutkovsky; Credit to Roadside Attractions

For his grizzled nature and deranged persona off-screen, Sean Penn is always a reliable actor able to inject depth and anguish through his tough exterior. Gene has seen it all—even so much as being at ground zero at 9/11. He’s reconciled that this is a job and that whatever emotions one has is unnecessary when being a professional. Yet the film shows him reaching a breakpoint in the third act, he makes a conscious decision that causes a rift between his partnership with Ollie. 

Penn can tackle difficult, often irredeemable characters and imbue them with an unspoken humanity. One of the better scenes involves him debating the ethical quandary of saving a patient riddled with health issues at a nursing home. “We’re just saving him so he can end up back here again,” he posits to Ollie. It’s one of the few quiet moments where the film’s energy is settled, we can breathe with the characters and allow some internalization that portrays some of the abstract nature of their jobs. 

Sheridan is good for what is written, but he is saddled with a nothing character that simply soaks and reacts to situations. Whenever he’s not riding the night shift he’s studying for the MCATS and sees being an EMT as a stepping stone rather than a long-term career that Gene has chosen. When he’s not studying he has a sexual one-sided relationship with a woman who is never given any reason to exist other than to take her clothes off. 

There are several scenes where it’s both Ollie and the camera ogling her naked body and she’s never given any dialogue or moments to shine. Even when she wears a shirt the film can’t help but have her be naked, and it wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it weren’t so omnipresent as the film desperately wants to show a tender side to Ollie but it’s flat on both the actors.

Katherine Waterston gets to have a brief cameo as Gene’s ex-wife. She looks after their daughter, as Gene puts his job over his family. It’s the standard haggard wife of a constantly working partner that only helps to show Gene’s glimmer of humanity with his daughter. 

There’s a moment when Lafontaine asks Ollie during one of their night calls, “Do you believe in Heaven? I don’t know if I believe in Heaven but I do believe in Hell,” as they stand over a decomposing corpse covered in flies. The film constantly bludgeons you into reaching some existential catharsis about death and the precarious nature of being alive. Lafontaine later remarks how they “are gods” when deciding who lives or dies. There’s a cynicism to the film that robs it of having any meaningful insight. Every alley, apartment, and living space is full of squalor and grim and every person is either dying or inflicting pain onto someone that makes Gotham City look like a utopia.

In some regards, there’s an appreciation for how unflatteringly transparent the film is with its startling images. It would be more tolerable if it didn’t portend to lofty notions of being surrounded by death, pain, and despair that come off as comical and overwrought with unearned emotions. By the end, the real hell is gaining nothing after watching two hours of this hopeless, emotionally empty bloody slab of a movie. 

Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai

Feature Image Credit to Roadside Attractions via Deadline