Let Him Go (2020)

Let Him Go arrives from Focus Features in 2020 with the quiet confidence of a film that knows precisely which audience it serves. Thomas Bezucha adapts Larry Watson's novel into a neo-Western that moves from a Montana ranch to the badlands of North Dakota, where a retired sheriff and his wife go looking for a grandson held by a clan that has taken the phrase off the grid as a personal challenge. Kevin Costner does the weathered lawman with practiced economy. Diane Lane does the grieving mother with more. The result is a genre piece that respects its own machinery.

Margaret Blackledge is the engine here. She packs the bags, brings the revolver, and refuses every invitation to give up, and Lane plays her with a resolve that carries the picture. The film treats this as maternal grit inside a familiar revenge structure. It never argues a thesis about it. A young Native American man, Peter Dragswolf, offers food and shelter along the way, and the screenplay lets him be helpful without turning him into a symbol or a lesson. The Weboys are abusers, not metaphors for anything larger. No economic critique attaches to them.

The film's refusals are as interesting as its actions. It plays its violence straight, lets the blood fall where it may, and never once turns to the camera to explain the moral. The 1961 to 1963 setting is texture, not argument. There is no sermon, no messaging, no reaching for the cultural moment. It is a well-made, grim, old-fashioned picture about grief and stubbornness, and it seems content to be exactly that.