114 min | R | November 6, 2020 | Focus Features
A grandmother and her retired-sheriff husband leave Montana to bring their grandson back from the family that swallowed him. The Weboys do not give children back. What starts as a custody dispute ends in fire.
Margaret and George Blackledge lose their son to a riding accident and watch their daughter-in-law remarry into the Weboy clan. When the new husband disappears across the Dakota line with the grandchild, Margaret decides they are going to get the boy. George follows because he loves her, not because he believes it will work. Thomas Bezucha frames this as a quiet drama about marriage and grief, then lets it harden into a revenge Western about a family that keeps its property by force. The real subject is what a long marriage owes itself when one partner decides the cost does not matter.
Diane Lane plays Margaret as a woman whose grief has curdled into resolve she cannot turn off. She makes the stubbornness frightening rather than noble. Kevin Costner plays George with the stillness of a man who already knows how this ends and goes anyway. The two of them communicate in glances and small concessions that read as decades of practice. Lesley Manville plays Blanche Weboy as a matriarch who runs her sons like a foreman and treats hospitality as a weapon. Her dinner-table scene turns politeness into a threat without raising her voice.
Bezucha adapts Larry Watson’s novel and directs with a patience that pays off in dread. The cinematography shoots the Montana and Dakota plains in wide, indifferent space that dwarfs the two old people crossing it. The editing holds shots long enough to let menace gather before anything happens. Bezucha stages the Weboy farmhouse as a closed system with the doors always slightly wrong. The score stays restrained until the violence arrives, which makes the violence land harder when it comes.
The film works as a study of two people and stumbles when it tries to be two genres. The restrained marriage drama and the bloody thriller never fully agree on which movie they are in. The shift from grief to gunfire arrives faster than the patient setup earns. What holds it together is Lane and Manville circling each other as two mothers who will not let go. The film is strongest when it trusts them to carry it and weakest when it reaches for the gun.