Don’t Let Go

Filmmaker Jacob Aaron Estes’s thriller features a faintly clever premise. Jack (David Oyelowo), a Los Angeles police detective, and his niece Ashley (Storm Reid) are very close. Since Jack’s brother and sister-in-law have a troubled marriage, Jack acts as Ashley’s surrogate father, and they regularly communicate on their cell phones. One day Jack gets a frantic call from Ashley, and upon investigating he discovers that she and her parents have been brutally murdered. Jack’s partner (Mykelti Williamson) and their boss (Alfred Molina) insist that the shattered man take time off to come to terms with the loss. But soon he begins getting more calls from Ashley, eventually accepting the fact that they are somehow coming from the past, when his niece was still alive. The pair then work together to solve the riddle of who was responsible for the murders—or from her perspective—murders-to-be. Can Jack save Ashley from dying? This time-twisting tale is obviously fantastic, and Estes deliberately muddies the waters with so much hyperkinetic editing and abrupt shifts of perspective that viewers will have difficulty following the plot twists. By the time the absurd resolution arrives—in an incredibly verbose shout-fest in which images whirl around desperately—most will have given up trying to make any sense of the goings-on, or even caring. Not a necessary purchase. (F. Swietek)