What does an outlaw do when a prophecy tells him his own child will end him? In Tim Sutton's 2021 western The Last Son, Sam Worthington's Isaac LeMay answers by turning the hunt inward, riding after the sons and daughters he abandoned before one of them can come for him.
What is The Last Son about?
Isaac LeMay has spent a lifetime taking what he wants at gunpoint, and the frontier has mostly let him. The one thing he cannot shoot his way past is a prophecy: one of his children is fated to kill him. LeMay's response is as cold as his reputation. He sets out to track down every child he ever fathered and walked away from, treating each as a threat to be removed before the curse can play out. The most dangerous of them is Cal, a long-lost son played by Colson Baker, who has grown into a man with his own reasons to want his father found. Bounty hunters are drawn to the trail by the price on LeMay's head, and Sheriff Solomon, played by Thomas Jane, follows close behind with the law's own claim on him.
About the cast
Sam Worthington anchors the film as LeMay, giving the outlaw a weary stillness that carries much of the story. Machine Gun Kelly, credited under his given name Colson Baker in the synopsis, takes the role of Cal, and Thomas Jane rides as Sheriff Solomon. Heather Graham heads a supporting cast that also includes Emily Marie Palmer, Kim DeLonghi, Danny Bohnen and Scotty Bohnen.
Context & significance
The western has always had room for stories about fathers and sons, but The Last Son inverts the usual shape: instead of a son avenging a father, a father sets out to pre-empt his children. Sutton treats the frontier as a bleak, wintry place where a curse feels as real as a bullet, and the film leans on landscape and silence as much as on action. At 96 minutes it is compact for the genre, moving from one encounter to the next without much pause. It belongs with the darker, more fatalistic strand of the form rather than the heroic one.
Watching The Last Son on Ktime
The Last Son streams on K-Time with a Persian dub, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow LeMay's hunt without reading subtitles. Watching requires a K-Time account login; the page you are reading is free.