Puzzle slots neatly together

Cinema

Don’t Let Go (PG) A grief-stricken homicide detective warps the linear flow of time to solve his brother’s murder-suicide in Jacob Aaron Estes’s confidently executed thriller.

Bolted together with familiar genre tropes, Don’t Let Go is anchored by compelling performances from Oxford-born David Oyelowo as the crusading cop and 16-year-old Storm Reid as his plucky niece, who is blissfully unaware of her grisly destiny. Estes’s script eschews deep, metaphysical discourse about fate to calmly explain every narrative twist, handholding the audience so noone gets left behind making sense of the film’s gnarly logic. The writer-director intentionally obscures key facts until a breathless final act when a mosaic of flashbacks and cross cuts between interconnected time frames neatly slots into place the pieces of the puzzle.