Rip-off name sparks gran’s wild revenge in ‘Thelma’ – Gadget

Thelma takes the action-thriller formulation and flips it, placing a feisty grandmother on the centre of a high-stakes mission. After falling sufferer to a telephone rip-off claiming her grandson is in peril, she units out to struggle again.

The comedy is streaming on Showmax from as we speak (22 September 2025). It premiered on M-Net (DStv Channel 1010) final night time (21 September).

Thelma earned 95-year-old star June Squibb the perfect actress in an motion film award on the 2025 Critics Choice Super Awards, amongst different accolades. This was the primary main movie position of her 70-year profession, which features a supporting actress Oscar nomination for Nebraska. Squibb will star in Scarlett Johansson’s upcoming directorial debut, Eleanor The Great. 

Thelma’s accomplice in crime is performed by Richard Roundtree in his ultimate display efficiency; he handed away in 2023 and had appeared in Shaft. Together on a motorised scooter, the pair tackle obstacles with willpower, turning an peculiar con into a unprecedented fightback.

The quest takes the grandmother throughout Los Angeles as she refuses to let the crime go unanswered. What begins as an try to get well what was stolen quickly turns into a take a look at of willpower, as she proves she is way extra succesful than her household imagines.

Thelma is the function directorial debut of Josh Margolin, who additionally wrote the screenplay. The film is impressed by a real-life incident involving his personal grandmother.

“My grandma refuses to die,” says Margolin in Thelma’s manufacturing notes. “She simply turned 103 and has survived the Great Depression, WWII, the demise of her husband, a double mastectomy, colon most cancers, a valve substitute and an ongoing however allegedly benign mind tumour.

“So, when she bought duped by telephone scammers a couple of years in the past (and almost despatched them hundreds of {dollars} for my ‘bail’), it pierced my long-standing perception that she was someway infallible, a perception that introduced me some form of undue consolation all through my very own anxious existence.

“The inevitability of shedding her has develop into more and more actual to me, and so has her dogged persistence to carry on to her sense of self, as her physique and thoughts stubbornly sluggish. I wrote Thelma from this place of reckoning.

“I wanted to explore her fight for what’s left of her autonomy just as I was beginning to consider mine. She has always been larger-than-life to me, and I felt compelled to dramatise her story with the trappings of a genre that captures her powerful spirit and celebrates her grit and tenacity – action.” 

Margolin says Thelma is a twist on the traditional one final job flick.

“As far as I’m concerned, watching my grandma get onto a high mattress is as thrilling and terrifying as Tom Cruise driving a motorcycle off a cliff. Just in a very different way,” he says. “The story is an epic journey on a granular scale as a result of, for her, the little issues current nice risks.

“I need the viewers to really feel these challenges viscerally, by no means making gentle of the energy it takes for her to maneuver by way of the world. The movie shrinks down the tropes of the motion style to a really human scale and makes use of them to discover ageing, fragility, and nervousness.

“I couldn’t imagine anyone doing this but June, who I feel so lucky to have gotten to work with. At 93 years old, she left it all on the field, bringing equal parts vulnerability and resilience (as well as doing the majority of her own stunts). Thelma centres and celebrates her as well as those who would see themselves reflected in a type of action hero we rarely see.”

Fred Hechinger, recognised for his work in The White Lotus, seems as Thelma’s grandson. The forged contains Parker Posey (Lost in Space), Clark Gregg (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Nicole Byer (Nailed It!), and Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange).