Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Old Henry’ on VOD, A Boutique Western Full Of Hard Choices And Rich Genre Flair

Starring Tim Blake Nelson, the seasoned character actor of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs fame who’ll next be seen in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, Old Henry (VOD) finds its perfect yeoman in Nelson as a man with a hidden past forced into violent circumstances in a grudging bid to protect what’s his. 

OLD HENRY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “It can be hard to tell who and what a man is,” drawls Tim Blake Nelson in voiceover as the sweeping grassland of early 1900’s Oklahoma undulates across rolling hills. (Waterford, Tenn. was the stand-in for the setting of Old Henry.) And as Ketchum (Stephen Dorff), a man who purports to be a lawman, shoots a guy before dragging him behind his party’s horses, crushing his windpipe, and hanging him for good measure, it’s clear that around here, morality is as hard to make out as the faces of riders on the horizon. Nelson’s Henry is hard at work on his farmer’s plot alongside restless teenage son Wyatt (Gavin Lewis, Little Fires Everywhere) and taciturn brother-in-law Al (Trace Adkins) when a horse appears, riderless and with a bloodstained saddle horn. Henry investigates, and discovers an unconscious man bleeding into the dirt from a nasty gunshot wound, his pistol and a satchel full of cash strewn alongside. Henry’s been around long enough to know trouble when he sees it, but still transports man and loot back to the homestead for recuperation and safe-keeping.

The stranger turns out to be Curry (Scott Haze, Minari), who says that he’s law, and that Ketchum, the man he’s after, is the one who’s lying about it. Henry, wary and on guard, keeps Curry at arm’s length while facing down Ketchum during a tense visit to the farm. All of this circling already smells bad, no matter who’s telling the truth, and Henry can see the violence creeping like a shadow.

When it finally, inevitably arrives, in a standoff that becomes a defense of Henry’s hard-earned homestead, the shootout lays bare the intentions of everybody involved, and brings into focus the shrouded past that Henry had kept locked away from Wyatt and the world. It can be hard to tell who and what a man is. But there’s a means to an end in the clicking of a revolver’s chamber or the crackling report of a .30-6.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Westerns: still relevant? Yes, as recent explorations of the form’s dark matter have proven, films like 2014’s The Keeping Room, written by Julia Hart and starring Brit Marling, or the ominous frontier grist and horror overtones of The Wind (2019), available now on Netflix. Hostiles, meanwhile, written and directed by Scott Cooper, was steeped in violence and revisionism, and featured Christian Bale in full brood form.

Performance Worth Watching: Old Henry is Nelson’s film, no doubt. But Stephen Dorff brings a wryness and guarded, threatening air about his character’s own background to the role of Ketchum, the bankrobber with an obsessive nature and extremely dark heart.

Memorable Dialogue: “You really think that’s necessary?” Wyatt asks as his dad ties the wounded stranger to the bed. “It ain’t not necessary,” huffs Henry. There are passages throughout Old Henry that evoke the speech patterns of an earlier America, as well as the spectrum of Westerns and other films set in those times. “Now, why don’t you cool his fever instead of vaporizing on every thought that comes into your head?”

Sex and Skin: Nope.

Our Take: Old Henry reaches into the Western tool box and roots around until it finds the implements it needs. Here is a solitary man, framed against the doorway of his windswept home. Here is a bad man, his hat crooked and riding at the head of a pack of gunmen. Here is a saddle bag full of ill-gotten money, here is a scarred wooden box full of secret history, here is frontier justice in all its stark duality. But for all of these representative elements, there are just as many Western tropes that Old Henry writer-director Potsy Ponciroli willingly discards. There is no hardscrabble town here, with its caking dust and clanking blacksmith and rowdy saloon barroom. There is no damsel in distress. There is only the crisp desolation of the landscape, and the parties putting their stamp on it, whether through sweat and toil or blood and avarice. In this, director of photography John Matysiak’s enveloping exterior wide shots and knack for storytelling inside the intimate setting of Henry’s farmstead are keys, as is the exclusive use of natural light (barring an occasional gas lamp), and an evocative score from Jordan Lehning.

Old Henry is driven, too, by its touches of linguistic anachronism — Ketchum referring to “devilry,” Al muttering about a situation “turning into some kind of fricassee,” and the way folks of the era tended to pronounce “at all” with a hard “T.” Nelson, together with Dorff and Haze and Adkins, lean heartily into all of this, creating big presences. There’s no Old West town needed to bring the rich atmosphere of Old Henry to life.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Led by a singular performance from Tim Blake Nelson, Old Henry looks backward lovingly at the Western form while immersing its story anew in the tenets and tensions that have always fueled the genre.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges