| Little Lorraine is named after the small town it’s set in. Based on a true story, Little Lorraine is a small community settled on the Atlantic Coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The residents went to church, went fishing or worked in the mine until they were caught up in the center of a massive cocaine smuggling ring in the late 1980s and early 90s. I was wary of the crime drama aspect but I’m a sucker for the “based on a true story” tag. A drama that goes straight for the heart with the real men caught between a rock and a hard place. | | 2025
Directed by: Andy Hines
Screenplay by: Andy Hines, Adam Baldwin
Based on the song by Adam Baldwin
Starring: Stephen Amell, Stephen McHattie, Auden Thornton
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A true blue-collar town, Little Lorraine’s employment is centered around a mine which exploded leaving dozens of young men out of work and an entire town huddled for a funeral of the mine’s captain who lost his life saving the lives of the others. The community looks out for one another, as they are pretty much all in the same boat.
Jimmy (Stephen Amell) has a wife and two young kids at home, and is considering moving to get a job at a different mine in a neighboring town. Until Jimmy’s no-good Uncle Huey (Stephen McHattie) shows up. Everybody knows Huey is bad news from the last time he was driven out of town for his latest criminal scheme. Huey insists it’s different this time, he’s got a legit job offer for Jimmy and it’s all on the up-and-up; everybody knows better than to believe him, except for Jimmy’s wife. Jimmy then recruits his two best friends Tommy (Joshua Close) and Jake (Steve Lund) to work on Huey’s lobster fishing boat.
There’s a little bit of comedy as three miners who have never worked on a lobster boat are about to become fishermen. The humour is pretty dark and short-lived as everybody – and I mean everybody: the audience, the three men at the center, their wives at home – knows this is too good to be true. Sure enough, an interpol agent from Colombia who specializes in drug trafficking shows up as the men just have to make a “little exchange” of who knows how many kilos of cocaine.
Where this movie really shines, apart from the perfectly gritty cinematography (filmed on location in Nova Scotia), is how Jimmy, Tommy and Jake handle their new criminal lives, and how the community responds. Remember, the entire community is very religious, so it’s not long before one of the men has confessed to Father Williams (Sean Astin) and even when all three friends respond in different ways, they will always come back to each other.
Little Lorraine is a powerful tale of community as every single character (except Huey of course) grapples with the morality of what they’re doing while an outsider comes into town to take down an international drug smuggling ring. It’s a dark, devastating story of three men driven to extremes, how easy it is to take advantage of people when they’re at their lowest immediately following a tragedy.
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