Review: Don’t Let Go Offers High-Octane Functionality but Little Emotion

Jacob Estes’s Don’t Let Go begins on a melancholic note. After Ashley (Storm Reid) emerges from a Los Angeles movie theater looking for her father (Bryan Tyree Henry), the teen calls her police detective uncle, Jack (David Oyelowo), who stops what he’s doing to pick her up and take her to a diner. The scene between the uncle and niece is filled with tender details, such as Ashley, who’s old enough to go to the movies by herself, playing with her uncle by drawing in crayons on her placemat. But such details aren’t enough for viewers to invest in these characters immediately, given the speed with which the plot kicks into motion and the dead bodies start piling up: Ashley’s, her father’s, her mother’s (Shinelle Azoroh), even that of the family dog. All are victims of what will prove to be a sprawling conspiracy.

Thanks, however, to the film’s supernatural twist, Jack hasn’t seen the last of Ashley. Days later, as Jack is mourning the deaths of his niece and her parents, and in quintessential 21st-century fashion—by watching old cellphone videos while getting drunk—his phone rings, and, according to the caller ID, it’s Ashley. For her, it’s still one week ago, and as such she’s unaware that’s she’s about to die in her parallel universe and that she’s already dead in his.

Once Jack comes around to believing that this is really happening, he and his niece partner up across space and time so he can figure out who killed Ashley and her family. And all the while, Jack strains to keep from his niece the odd nature of their new relationship, only telling her that her dad might be in trouble, and asking her for details such as the model and license plates of the cars that approach her house. Jack finally explains their temporal disconnect in a scene featuring a rainbow of masticated gumballs: She chews one up and sticks it under a table in a diner in her timeline, while he pulls it off in his and tells her over the phone what color it is. It’s a visually clever moment, but it’s spoiled by a terrible line about their power to change what happens: “This chewed-up piece of gum—you can unchew it!”

Throughout, the characters’ choices open up new timelines, setting Jack’s consciousness off on a roller-coaster ride of various strands of the multiverse, and these psychic shifts sometimes recall the frame-rattling dimension surfing in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Would that Estes had kept the particulars of the murder mystery as intricate as the sci-fi of Jack and Ashley’s communion: Don’t Let Go is content to lazily introduce clues that lead linearly to others, just like a trail of breadcrumbs, piling up without any false leads or red herrings that might have allowed Jack and Ashley to live a little and draw us in. As the storyline moves forward, the characters are effectively running in circles for most of the film, never feeling as if they’re defined by their actions—until, unexpectedly, they are.

The film’s last act reveals a circular, time-travel tragedy in which Jack and Ashley’s sleuthing instigates the very crime they’re trying to solve. Don’t Let Go is mostly all high-octane functionality, but then the climax revels in slowed-down emotional close-ups and artfully composed wide shots with weeds swaying in the breeze, evoking the Malick-lite grace of David Lowery’s films and Estes’s feature-length debut, Mean Creek. Jack’s monomaniacal pursuit of his family’s killer speaks to his dogged devotion, but at the film’s end, his avuncular love for his niece also comes through, and the moment packs a much-needed emotional punch, landing a lot harder than you expect given the cranked-up gumshoeing that precedes it.