jrhovind’s review published on Letterboxd:
“Are you prepared to kill a just man?” Ripstein’s debut microcosmically reduces the Western’s pageantry of revenge and score-settling to a tortured crisis of ugly machismo. Two sons grappling with the legacy of their father’s death eighteen years earlier, each of them unable to see the truth about his humble killer when they’re blinded by so many inherited ideas of what a man is supposed to be. “Some things just keep repeating themselves, whether we like it or not, like curses.” When honor is just another lie men tell themselves to hold on to their illusions of power, the town around them growing emptier and dustier with which passing year like a reminder of the small handful of things that are actually fundamentally true. “Time goes by and you just feel yourself rotting away.” Moments of such melancholy tenderness as the recently released killer tries to simply just be with the little time he has left, free from all the old lies and codes that keep the younger men going; the blunt arrival of such a pathetic ending like a stark reminder of just how cruelly powerful those old lies still are.
jrhovind liked this review
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