Imagine it’s 3 AM and your best friend looks and you and your other best friend and says, “Let’s watch a horror movie.” Is this a horror movie? No, no it is not. We got a thriller instead thanks to the aimless Netflix scroll. In that mysterious and whimsical scroll, we came across “Don’t Let Go.”
“Don’t Let Go” is the story of the relationship between Jack (David Oyelowo), a police detective, and his niece Ashley (Storm Reid). I would like to say that his brother is played by Brian Tyree Henry and I want y’all to stop hiring high profile actors that I like for roles where we only see them in like four scenes. Any who, the screenwriters do a great time of establishing their bond early in the film and not spending half the movie with us watching them on the phone or riding around in a car together. Then, we get to action. He gets a jumbled and distressed call from his niece that he can’t make out, and when he calls her back, it goes straight to voicemail. Later that night, he goes to the house and everyone, including the dog, had been murdered. Now, what’s odd about the murder is Jack knows who his brother is. A former drug dealer with a bipolar disorder who was changing his life around so he wouldn’t still be in the streets. The crime scene, for Jack, looks staged. The scene looks like everyone was home living their best life and someone in the house murdered everyone and the killed his or herself. This doesn’t sit right with Jack. How Jack is able to work on a case involving all this closest family members, I have no idea. In the mist of his investigation, he gets a call from Ashley. He’s startled at first, but then he becomes intrigued.
I know what you’re thinking right now. It has to be whoever murdered them using Ashley’s phone to get to Jack. Nope. It really is Ashley calling him…but from two to three days before her murder.
Here’s what did now work for this movie. Much like another movie I recently reviewed, screenwriters introduced this supernatural element with no explanation. Cool, he gets a call from Ashley days before her murder and he can now guide her through what to do to not be murdered….but how? How does this work? Why does this work? Jack is confused and so are we. Eventually, we go with it, but the entire film I was questioning this and it’s the main device of the movie. Then, we get to the end, and boy, what I upset. Besides me being confused about the time jumping phone call and changes to the future, they added a villain who was right under our noses. What went well here is the person you think is the murder has already played villains in their career, so it’s easy to typecast them into a red herring. That part I loved, but then they revealed the real murderer and the motivation was foggy (and that’s putting it nicely). We also don’t get real clarity of how the brother was involved. Did he willingly take the drugs to sell? Was it supposed to be a setup? Did they think he was going to tell about who gave him the drugs? And why did we need to kill the entire family and the dog? They didn’t seem to know what was going on anyway.
The entire ending could go except the the tail end of the film with the “you save me, I save you” motive. That was beautiful but nothing immediately before that. What could have made this movie better? I’ll tell you what could have made it better. If they had spent some time throwing us some breadcrumbs about what would happen at the end. My best friend did guess what ended up happening, but he did not guess the motivations which could have also used some breadcrumbs. Let us in on what’s happening just enough so we confuse ourselves before you put it altogether for us. The best thrillers and mysteries do that, and I will never understand why people don’t follow that formula.
Honestly, those are the only critiques, including more Brian Tyree Henry. If you had added more of him and his wife, then we could have gotten a more in-depth look into what was happening instead of speculating. As far as we know, from just watching the film and being left to make our own assumptions, he was an innocent bystander in this plot, but we don’t know why they picked him. It would have even been cooler if they implicated Jack somehow. It was weak to try and say Jack came in and killed the only family he had.
The movie is worth the watch, but the ending is not worth the cleverness of the rest of the film. This film deserved a better ending! But what do you all think? Give it a watch and you tell me what you think.
