Cold Wallet, Well Go USA’s new darkly comedic home invasion thriller from director Cutter Hodierne, becomes increasingly more absurd as it unfolds. At every turn, the movie’s heroes — a group of excitable retail investors — make unhinged choices that make them feel more like cartoons than people who have complex lives outside of Reddit. But in the film’s story about how quickly big bets on crypto can go left, you can feel Cold Wallet tapping into something very real about what makes people believe that rugs can never be pulled from beneath their feet.
Cold Wallet tells the tale of Billy (Raúl Castillo), a down-on-his-luck father, who, after a nasty separation from his ex, decides to bet everything he has on a hot, new crypto coin called Tulip. Like his twitchy hacker friend Eva (Melonie Diaz) and MMA-obsessed buddy Dom (Tony Cavalero), Billy sees Tulip as an opportunity to radically change his lot in life. It’s easy for the trio to pour their money into Tulip because they genuinely believe that the coin’s creator, Charles Hegel (Josh Brener), wants to make the world a better place for people like them. But when Tulip’s value suddenly tanks one day and Hegel — an eclectic recluse — dies under very dubious circumstances, Billy’s crew is convinced that they’ve been screwed over, and they set out on a deadly mission to put things right.
Especially once people start speculating that Hegel isn’t actually dead, Cold Wallet’s plot begins to sound more and more like a heightened riff on the very real story of how thousands of people lost everything in 2018 when Quadriga cofounder Gerald Cotten unexpectedly dropped dead during his honeymoon.
When I recently sat down to speak with Hodierne about Cold Wallet, he told me that he very much wanted for the movie to play like the kind of revenge fantasy people hurt by Quadriga might dream about. In Hegel, we’re supposed to see shades of the greed that made Cotten a wealthy man before his death. But Hodierne also wanted his villain to feel like a larger-than-life example of the way capitalism can turn people into ghoulish caricatures, which is why he looked to Martin Shkreli for inspiration.
“With Hegel, we wanted to lean into him being the kind of guy who is like ‘the rules are here to be manipulated and taken advantage of; I’m just doing my part,’” Hodierne explained. “He’s the type of person who thinks ‘if the rules aren’t good enough to stop me, then whose problem is that really?’ That kind of attitude is very dangerous and I think Hegel’s character resembles a lot of the people who are taking over the country right now.”
Though Hodierne owns some crypto of his own, he sees memecoins like President Donald Trump’s and the Hawk Tuah girl’s as “bastardizations of crypto’s true potential” that reflect the US’s wealth-obsessed culture. It was important to Hodierne that Cold Wallet illustrate what makes people so game to bet on the blockchain even though the crypto space is filled with horror stories. But through Billy’s character, in particular, Hodierne wanted to reinforce how quickly investing in crypto can upend people’s lives in disastrous ways.
“With Billy, it was about this tug and pull between enthusiasm and desperation — enthusiasm to evangelize Tulip coin’s possibilities to his friends, and then his desperation when it’s all gone,” Hodierne told me. “He’s the embodiment of a freefall event or a crash in the crypto market, and he has this level of rage that has been amplified tenfold because this was his last fucking try and it backfired.”
As Billy and his friends arm themselves and set out for Hegel’s remote compound, Cold Wallet frames their mission in a comedic light that’s at odds with the fact that they’re psyching themselves up to kill a man if push comes to shove. The framing makes them feel like people who’ve spent too much time watching action movies, but Hodierne told me that Cold Wallet’s silliness is, in part, one of the ways he wanted to convey the sense of desperation that often leads to people putting their faith in digital currencies.
“There are so many systems in place to sort of keep people just getting by, and crypto can feel like a way out,” Hodierne said. “I have friends who became like multi-millionaires from crypto, and that’s the kind of positive reinforcement that can make people think ‘oh, this is worth the risk.’ That was the vibe when crypto had its major resurgence during the Covid era and everyone was desperate.”
As dark as Cold Wallet gets, Hodierne always knew that keeping the film funny would be key to making it accessible to folks who have kept their distance from crypto. Billy and his friends are supposed to feel like the sorts of ordinary people you might know and be able to sympathize with. But they’re also meant to remind you that, in most cases, things like Tulip are designed to help the few and hurt the masses.
“Unfortunately, I think the joke is always on the little guy,” Hodierne said. “Even with GameStop all that stuff, ultimately, Wall Street was able to follow the movement and benefit from it. Even when the little guy is getting his public win, the big guy can always tack on to it, and it all just reminds you that it’s hard to beat the house.”
Cold Wallet is now in theaters and available to purchase digitally.
