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 about a widowed farmer that just wants peace for him and his son, but trouble finds him in the form of an injured stranger. It takes in some of the classic Wild West gunslinging, horse riding, and hunting down an outlaw, but the film expands on these, considering the emotional weight of the kills in 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.