BARRON'S COVE - Mark Reviews Movies

Barron's Cove, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 5, 2025

Writer/director Evan Ari Kelman really wants to avoid the most compelling and frightening idea of Barron's Cove, a thriller that keeps changing its terms and a few of its characters until the very end of the story. That certainly keeps us guessing, but it comes at the cost of any real narrative and thematic consistency.

The setup seems clear from the opening scene, in which we see a trio of boys near some railroad tracks. One of them is tied to the tracks, and as another boy calls out a warning about an approaching train, the third one works to undo the knots of the rope. Before the scene cuts away, it's obvious that it's too late for the restrained kid.

The central question of Kelman's screenplay, then, becomes why Ethan (Christian Convery), the boy who seems responsible for the other boy's gruesome death, did what he did, and the added layer, of course, is why he did such a dangerous thing in the first place. That's all Caleb (Garrett Hedlund, indulging in the melodrama a bit too often), the dead child's father, wants to know. After teasing several possibilities and additional participants in the son's death, the movie eventually gives us something of a straight answer.

The buildup to that revelation, though, takes us through all sorts of convoluted plotting, plenty of nearly inexplicable conspiracy, and a couple variations of the character of Ethan that seem to evolve in order to constantly toy with our expectations. The first version of the kid is the most fascinating, troubling, and, probably, worth examining within this sort of morally malleable material.

After all, it's not as if our protagonist is a particularly decent person. Caleb is an enforcer for local crime lord Benji (Stephen Lang), his uncle and a man to whom Caleb owes a lot—as, obviously, will be revealed much later. Our man is capable of violence but would prefer to avoid it if possible, as he shows when trying to make it clear to a local construction outfit that his boss wouldn't be happy to learn that they've been buying building material from another supplier. With a weekend getaway planned with his son, Caleb eventually gives in to his uncle's desire that the construction head learns a proper lesson, so when he goes to pick up his kid from his ex-wife Jackie (Brittany Snow), his knuckles are bruised and bloodied from whatever pain he inflicted on the guy.

As it turns out, the boy killed by the train was Caleb and Jackie's son, whom he was supposed to pick up after school but didn't because of his uncle's demand. The police are being quiet about how the boy ended up on the tracks, and after it's revealed that Ethan's father is local city councilman and prospective state senator Lyle (Hamish Linklater), Caleb becomes convinced that the investigation, which concludes that the boy's death was a suicide, has covered up something.

Ethan's attitude about what happened to his classmate, of course, is more than reason enough for that suspicion. The boy seems cold, calculating, capable of putting on fake emotions at will, and cruelly sticks out his tongue at a grieving Caleb after he asks the kid what happened to his son. The idea that Ethan might be an archetypical "bad seed" gives this story a real edge to it, especially after Caleb determines that no one—not the cops and not even his uncle, who wants to stay in the politician's favor—is going to do anything about his son's death and possible murder. If Caleb is going to get justice or revenge, that'll be up to him.

Thus begins the movie's constant shifting of its intentions and its depiction of Ethan, whom Caleb abducts and brings to his family's lake house (The guy, by the way, has an almost supernatural power to control the movie's editing so that he can, for example, know exactly where his dead son's body is and take Ethan in broad daylight after an incredibly noticeable chase). This puts forth a genuinely awful set of possibilities: that the boy is a murderous sociopath, that Caleb is willing to torture the child to get the truth, and that this is a moral quandary that, as outlandish and contrived as everything leading up to it may be, could result in a genuinely unsettling sort of thriller.

Such a story, obviously, would require quite a bit of effort, tonal control, and no small degree of boldness. Instead, Kelman gives us an even bigger conspiracy, revolving around Lyle's strange scheme to help him win his election, and a series of standoffs and chases, as Caleb and Ethan try to get away from a bunch of mercenaries and gangsters trying to capture or kill them. The father and the boy who may or may not have murdered his son, by the way, bond over a shared understanding of generational abuse and trauma, which ultimately feels like a cheap way to add some emotional and thematic weight to a story that has little room for or real interest in such an idea.

Barron's Cove starts with the promise of a truly upsetting and unnerving kind of thriller. Every step it takes, however, undermines or contradicts that potential.

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