Grief is the engine of Let Him Go, and a long drive out of Montana is its shape. Thomas Bezucha's 2020 crime drama puts Diane Lane and Kevin Costner at the centre of a story about a retired sheriff and his wife who decide that losing their son does not mean losing their grandson too.
What is Let Him Go about?
On a Montana ranch, an older couple are still raw from burying their son when the boy's widow remarries and moves away with their small grandson. Word reaches them that the new husband's people are not the kind anyone should want a child near. The couple load up the car and set out for the Dakotas, where the family lives off the grid, answers to no one and does not take kindly to visitors with questions. What starts as a polite attempt to see the boy hardens into a standoff, as the grandparents realise the household is ruled by a matriarch whose hospitality is a threat in disguise. Each side underestimates the other, and the film tightens from quiet domestic sorrow into a tense rescue in which an old lawman's instincts and a grandmother's stubbornness are the only tools left.
About the cast
Diane Lane and Kevin Costner anchor the film, and the marriage at its heart is weathered enough that whole conversations happen in a look across a kitchen table. Lesley Manville is the most unsettling presence in the ensemble, and the clash between the two households gives the second half its charge. Kayli Carter, Will Brittain, Ryan Bruce, Otto Hornung and Bram Hornung fill out the two families whose claims on one child set the story in motion.
Context & significance
Bezucha frames the story as a modern Western in all but costume: wide prairie skies, a road that leads somewhere dangerous, and a code of decency tested by people who do not share it. A Canadian and American co-production, it runs just under two hours and spends its first act in near silence before the threat arrives. The Crime, Drama and Thriller labels all apply, but the film is unusually patient for the genre, treating the grandparents' mourning with as much weight as the eventual confrontation.
Watching Let Him Go on Ktime
Let Him Go is on K-Time with a free account login, offered with a Persian dub as well as Persian subtitles. The service is built in Farsi for Iranian viewers abroad, and the film can be watched on a phone, tablet, television or computer.