The young men run through an orange grove and a swamp, eventually coming to a farmhouse where they enter and steal civilian clothes.

The inmates leave the farmhouse and travel down a dirt road to a rural convenience store where Ryan steals an ice cream bar.

The two break in, but while the other inmate steals the drugs, Ryan is distracted by the dogs in the kennels, one of which he frees and later places in the window of his brother's room.

Robert Horton of Film Comment wrote, "Given the state of the arthouse/indie scene these days, it can't be too surprising that a film like Trans is left by the roadside...yet Trans is exactly the sort of smallish, idiosyncratically personal movie that belongs in the arthouse loop; for various reasons it will never draw the Happy, Texas-size crowd, but it will mesmerize the kind of audience that regularly takes a chance on something at a repertory house with an adventurous calendar.

"[7] Of the film's distribution concerns, Brett Sokul of Miami New Times wrote, "Despite the reams of praise, conventional industry wisdom saw Trans as 'difficult,' i.e., not a reliable arthouse ticket-seller.

It's an attitude that dramatizes the increasingly commercial pressures on the world of independent film, once a respite from the dictates of the box office but now often just as enslaved to it.

[12] Wesley Morris of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote "Trans itches to be hyper-stylized but settles for occasional flights into coolness".

[13] Sam Adams of Philadelphia City Paper opined, "Goldberger’s exceptionally weird debut invokes Jarmusch, Southern Gothic and THX 1138-style sci-fi".

[14] Gavin Smith from Film Comment magazine said, "Julian Goldberger's idiosyncratic Trans, which follows the nocturnal wanderings and random encounters of a juvenile detention center escapee amid the strip malls and neighborhoods of Ft. Myers, Florida, may have had a budget a fraction of anything in competition, but it showed ten times the inspiration and cinematic integrity.

"[15] Lawrence Van Gelder from The New York Times wrote, "Trans remains a sensitive evocation of youthful turmoil".

[16] In a favorable review from The Village Voice, critic Amy Taubin wrote: "What's most remarkable about Trans is how faithful it is to Ryan's consciousness and to the way it shifts between fantasy and a mesmerized response to details of the outside world.