DON’T LET GO (15)

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, hand-holding the audience so no one 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. On June 28, Los Angeles police detective Jack Radcliff (Oyelowo) receives a muffled telephone call from his teenage niece, Ashley (Reid). The conversation is abruptly cut short and when Jack returns the call, he is diverted to her voicemail. That night the cop pays an impromptu visit to Ashley and finds his brother Garret (Brian Tyree Henry), sister-in-law Susan (Shinelle Azoroh), his niece and the family’s dog shot dead. Evidence at the scene suggests Garret murdered the family in a drug-fuelled haze then turned the gun on himself. Jack receives a call to his mobile a few days later from Ashley. The voice on the other end of the line is apparently his niece and she is alive and well. He surmises that she is talking to him from a few days before the massacre. Don’t Let Go is a solid foray into sci-fi suspense.