It’s not easy to abandon the past. Even if you want to shed your new identity, the memory of what you’ve done still linger in other people’s minds, especially if guns and violence are involved. Old Henry is one of the few Westerns that actually examines that. Of course, it holds some of the classic Wild West gunslinging, horse riding, and hunting down an outlaw, but the film actually expands on these. The film doesn’t stop on the cool moments– it considers the emotional weight of the kills, the blood on the gunslinger’s hand, and the past that inevitably haunts him, through an unexpected twist that plays with the genre’s tropes. Old Henry is much more somber than badass compared to classic Westerns, but it’s this approach that proves that there’s so much more to the genre that has yet to be explored.

The plot twist.