Reviews Let Him Go Kevin Costner excels in a
gripping neo-western thriller
Tara Brady, Irish Times Thu, Dec 17,
2020
Review: Costner keeps it earthy but the film is owned by the warring female
characters
The southern gothic doesn't quite fit
with the carefully drawn central couple. But Bezucha ... keeps a vice-ike hold on the viewer's attention.
--Irish Times
Let Him Go is a moving and
gripping Western with particularly strong performances from Diane Lane as a grieving yet resolute
mother and from Lesley Manville as her despicable nemesis. --Lewis Knight
Let Him Go's uneven blend of adult drama and revenge thriller is smoothed
over by strong work from a solid veteran cast. --Rotton Tomatoes
The official trailer for Let
Him Go, starring Diane Lane, Kevin Costner, Lesley Manville and Kayli Carter. Video: Focus
Features
Pitched somewhere between the Coen Brothers' No Country for
Old Men and the hicksploitation story-within-the-story found in Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, this
gripping neo-western thriller contains all that is good and bad about death in American movies, a
cinema where death and grieving can always be remedied by more death and violence.
Earthy, engaging performances from Diane
Lane and Kevin Costner ground the film's more preposterous twists and turns as their ageing ranchers, Margaret and
George Blackledge, take on some bad good ol' boys.
As writer-director Thomas Bezucha's handsome thriller opens, it's an
unspecified pre-mobile phone year, and the Blackledges are raising horses in Montana with their
extended family, including son, James (Ryan Bruce), his wife, Lorna (Kayli Carter), and the couple's infant son,
Jimmy.
A year after James is killed in a freak equestrian accident,
Lorna remarries the prim-looking Donnie (Will Brittain).
Donnie, however, isn't as wholesome as he first appears. Not long after
Margaret witnesses him hit her grandson and Lorna on the
street, the family disappears, leaving Margaret and George to
embark on a desperate search through North Dakota. There, they find the cult-like
Weboy family, headed up by brassy matriarch Blanche
(Leslie Manville, in the most terrifying turn
of her career), a woman whose southern hospitality makes one pine for the relatively civilised embrace
of Leatherface's clan in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
It's the kind of role that Costner, a
movie cowboy born at the wrong time in movie history, excels at. But
the film is owned by the warring female characters. Margaret is as cantankerous as
she is admirable, and Blanche's pork-chop dinner is about as much fun for the table
guests as it is for the unfortunate pig.
The southern gothic doesn't quite fit with the carefully drawn central couple.
But Bezucha, adapting Larry Watson's 2013 novel, keeps a vice-like hold on the viewer's attention,
nonetheless.
Film Title: Let Him Go
Director:
Thomas Bezucha
Starring: Diane Lane,
Kevin Costner, Lesley Manville, Kayli Carter