The Snare Puts a High School Senior on a Wire

Merlin Camozzi’s The Snare puts an 18-year-old on a police wire after a small drug bust, then refuses to let the audience treat her as fiction. The feature, 1 hour and 50 minutes, opened in limited theaters on August 21, 2026 and reached VOD on August 25.

Cassady McClincy Zhang plays Dani, a straight-A senior with a scholarship, a fast-food shift, and a younger brother to watch. Cops catch her with pills her crush handed her, then squeeze her into becoming a confidential informant. The film is Camozzi’s first feature. Its real subject is the kids that system still uses.

He Read About Teenage Informants and Could Not Let Go

A title card says the story that follows is based on true events. Dani is still a made-up lead. Camozzi has been clear about the seed. He started turning it into a film about ten years before release, after a 2012 magazine story by Sarah Stillman on teenage informants, a piece dated September 3, 2012. That is the article he read. The script work came later, around the time he finished a directing MFA at UCLA in 2016.

I started thinking about the project that became The Snare around ten years ago, after reading a story in The New Yorker about teenage informants. Confidential informants are the disposable raw materials of that assembly line of drug arrests. Shockingly, in all 50 states, the minimum age requirement is only 13 years old.

Merlin Camozzi, writer-director, director’s statement

He told Chase Hutchinson that 21 Jump Street reruns had sold him a version of this world with adult cops and tidy endings. The Stillman reporting showed teenagers, after minor busts, being sent into heavy buys. “This is crazy shit,” Camozzi said. He also said local departments chase federal money tied to busts and convictions, which turns young CIs into a way to hit monthly numbers.

That 13-year floor is his claim from the research that obsessed him. Written law is messier, and in some states there is no floor at all.

Eighteen Is Still Young in an Interrogation Room

Dani is 18, which matters. Juvenile informant statutes, where they exist, often stop at 17. A senior who can be charged as an adult can be leaned on with fewer of those extra checks, even if she still lives at home and cannot pay a lawyer.

In the film she is broke before the bust. Enrollment fees are due. Her mother, Faye (Lucy Walters), works multiple jobs. Dani is the stand-in parent for her brother Bison (Joaopaulo Malheiro). Marty (Dempsey Bryk) hands her a small amount of MDMA for a party. A parking-lot stop blows that up. Detectives, including a manipulative officer played by Elizabeth Stahlmann, offer the classic swap: wear a wire, or kiss college goodbye.

Glenn Kenny called the result “a potent critique of the tactics used to fight the seemingly never-ending war on drugs.” The pressure is the plot. Jeff Welty, a professor of public law and government at the University of North Carolina School of Government, mapped how thin state rules on juvenile informants still are, and Dani sits right on the adult side of that line.

How a Former Lawyer Shot His First Feature

Camozzi was born in Usk, a small town in northeast Washington, then moved through New England and Oregon. He has said the timber, dairy, and fishing towns of his childhood felt passed over, and that Dani’s squeeze is geographic as much as legal. He went to design school, then Northwestern Law, and worked as a transactional lawyer in tech and media before UCLA.

A 2020 new-directors profile recorded Camozzi’s path into directing while he was already assembling a first feature. The Snare is that film. Grey Star Entertainment produced it with Camozzi, Kristifor Cvijetic, Jenny Leigh Reed, and Kareem Mortimer. Filmhub is distributing. Paul Corley and Joshua Eustis wrote the score. Logan Floyd shot it. Stephen Jangro cut it.

THE ROAD TO VOD

1. 2022: McClincy Zhang said the indie was made that year in Schenectady, New York.
2. April 20, 2023: The production is described as having wrapped in Schenectady, with McClincy, Bryk, Walters, and Royce Johnson leading the cast.
3. March 16, 2025: World premiere at Cinequest in San Jose.
4. August 21, 2026: Limited theatrical opening, then VOD on August 25 on Apple TV, Amazon, and Cindee.

Camozzi shot most of the long interrogation and two-hander scenes in two or three takes. McClincy is in almost every frame. He said there are two tiny scenes without her.

Festival Crowds Keep Telling Him It Happened to Them

The film collected 4 wins and 1 nomination on the festival circuit before the commercial dates. That hardware is not a studio rollout. It is what a first feature gathers when programmers and crowds lock onto a nerve.

THE FESTIVAL HARDWARE

• Cinequest audience award: Best Sci-Fi, Horror, Thriller, with a separate New Visions nomination for Camozzi.
• Hell’s Half Mile: Audience Award at the film and music festival.
• Cordillera: Best Narrative Feature, plus Best Performance Feature for McClincy Zhang.
• Eleven critic reviews: Posted against the August listing, with fewer than 50 audience ratings when that count was logged.

Camozzi said the stranger part came after screenings. People walked up and told him, “This happened to me in high school. I’ve literally never talked to anybody about it,” or that it had happened to a best friend. Confidential informant work is named for a reason. The kids who survive it often do not advertise that they snitched, which is how the pipeline stays underwater.

That is why the movie plays closer to a true-crime document than to a twist machine, even when it borrows thriller grammar. One mid-film montage lets Dani plan the snare like a cop show, then dumps her at Marty’s house, unable to confess. Camozzi wrote a plotty double-cross draft and put it aside. He wanted the experience of people going through it, including the cops.

The Statute That Still Leaves the Door Open

The American case that still sits under this genre is Rachel Hoffman. She was 23, a Florida State graduate, when Tallahassee police sent her to a park on May 7, 2008, with a wire and about $13,000 to buy 1,500 ecstasy pills, 2.5 ounces of cocaine, and a gun. Dealers found the wire and killed her. Florida answered in 2009 with Rachel’s Law, now section 914.28.

The text of Florida’s Rachel’s Law statute bars officers from promising immunity, dropped charges, or a lighter sentence in exchange for CI work. It requires a chance to consult a lawyer on request, training records, and a written policy that includes “the level of supervisory approval required before a juvenile is used as a confidential informant.” It does not set a numeric age floor. Agencies must weigh age and maturity. They are not told “never.”

California moved after another death. The IACP paper on confidential informants retells the 1998 killing of 17-year-old Chad MacDonald, recruited after a drug arrest in California and later found tortured and strangled. Penal Code 701.5 now bars anyone 12 or younger and requires a court hearing for older minors. North Dakota, after Andrew Sadek died at 20, bans CIs who are 15 or younger. North Carolina still has no statewide statute. Welty notes a Mississippi appeals court once said there is “no prohibition against the use of juveniles as informants.”

THE STATE RULES ON YOUNG INFORMANTS

Dani would not be a juvenile on that chart. She would be an adult with a scholarship on the line, which is the leverage the movie keeps grinding. The closing text, in the source screening, says the scenario is not unusual. Camozzi’s festival line suggests that text is doing reportage.

She Sent a Tape and They Stopped Looking

McClincy Zhang, who played Lydia on The Walking Dead from 2019 to 2022 and Jackie in Love, Simon, did not walk in as a pre-attached star. Camozzi said the casting director went out to bigger names, then opened a general call. Zhang submitted a tape. After they met her, they shut the rest of the search down. “It ultimately is kind of The Cassady Show,” he said, and he meant it as praise.

The performance is the reason the informant mechanics land. She plays a kid who is competent at adult labor and still easy to trap in a room with a badge. Stahlmann’s cop scenes are the other half of that vise, two people trying to outplay each other under fluorescent light. Dempsey Bryk’s Marty is the crush and the possible target, which is the film’s ugliest knot: Dani has to hunt someone, and the person she wants is standing in the kill zone.

On September 9, 2026, she was promoted to series regular for Season 4 of CBS’s Tracker, which returns on October 4. The Snare is the lead role that makes that look like a second chapter rather than a first.

The Last Scene Points at People Who Never Got a Movie

The Snare is for sale and rent on Apple TV, Amazon, and Cindee after the short theatrical window. Camozzi posted the VOD notice himself.

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Eleven critic write-ups will not make this a wide-release event. That is not the test he set. He wanted a film that would connect the way movies connected for him as a kid “trying to keep my head above water,” and he wanted the assembly line of drug arrests to have a face that is not a detective’s.

The last scene, in screenings that have already played, springs a reversal. Then the text reminds you the pipeline is ordinary. Festival-goers keep filling in the rest with their own high school stories. Dani is the one who got a camera. The hidden stakeholders are the ones who still have to stay confidential.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Snare Based on a True Story?

The film opens with a title card saying it is based on true events, but Dani is a composite, not a biopic of Rachel Hoffman, who was 23 and already out of college when Tallahassee police used her. Camozzi has described hearing from festival-goers who said a version of this happened to them or to a friend in high school, which is the living record behind the card.

Does Rachel’s Law Give Informants a Free Lawyer?

No. Florida’s statute lets a person asked to serve as a confidential informant consult counsel on request, but it states that this does not create a right to publicly funded legal counsel, and section 8 says a failure to follow the law cannot be used by a defendant to create extra rights in a criminal case.

Can US Police Use Minors as Confidential Informants?

Yes in most of the country, with a patchwork of limits. California bars children 12 or younger, North Dakota bars 15 or younger, and New Jersey’s attorney general policy bars under 12 and discourages under 16, while some departments such as Asheville’s police write a hard ban under 18 even when the state has no statute.

Where Was The Snare Filmed?

Principal photography wrapped in Schenectady, New York, in the same region where Derek Cianfrance shot The Place Beyond the Pines, a match Camozzi confirmed when asked; McClincy Zhang has said the indie itself was made in 2022.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a film and of published statutes on confidential informants. It is informational only and is not legal advice, is not a guide to becoming or refusing to become an informant, and is not a substitute for counsel in any criminal matter. Anyone facing police pressure to cooperate should speak with a qualified criminal-defense lawyer in their state before answering questions or signing any informant agreement. Figures, release windows, and legal summaries reflect the sources cited here and can change with new listings, new cases, or new legislation.