Down River (2025)
Directed by Brian Barnard, Tommy Walton
Starring: Jody Thompson, Randy McDowell, and Ashley Sutton

Synopsis: A sheriff and deputy probe a crime at an abandoned farmhouse in West Virginia’s coal country. Their investigation uncovers dark secrets that endanger both the town and the sheriff’s grip on reality.

Rating: **1/2

There is something about this film that I really wanted to like. It starts off well. I’m a big fan of moody mysteries set in some mountainous backwater with a laconic sheriff who hunts a killer. Ronnie Long (Jodie Thompson, who also cowrote) fits that bill. He’s rugged and handsome. He’s got a past that haunts him.

Early on we’ll see him pull over his big old sheriff’s truck at that abandoned farmhouse. He finds a shovel that seems out of place and sneaks into the house. The tension builds. Something is about to happen. Then his partner and friend Shep Mills (Randy McDowell, who also cowrote) calls out. The tension drops, but now there is something strange happening. Ronnie shouldn’t be there. No crime seems to have been committed.

The above synopsis doesn’t really do the film justice. There isn’t much investigating in this movie. There is a twist about twenty minutes into it that I won’t spoil, and I really liked it, but it changes how we view everything that happened before. It changes the relationships the film was developing.

Sometime in the past, Ronnie suffered a tragedy that left him with a head wound. He’s turned to drinking. He started seeing things. Things that haven’t yet happened.

The film plays with time in strange ways. It is disjointed. It will flashback without warning or much in the way of indicating what it’s doing. There were several times I didn’t realize a scene was a flashback, and then I was confused about what was happening in the present. But then we’ll also see the things Ronnie is seeing in his visions. The way it jumps around between these things makes the plot difficult to get a handle on. Once the credits rolled and I had time to think about it, I was able to figure it all out, but it isn’t a good enough film to make me want to watch it again to see how the pieces fit together.

The cinematography is beautiful. The rolling hills and dense treelines are lovely to look at. I liked the story, but the jumbled way it was told was more confusing than interesting. Jodie Thompson is good when he’s being laconic, less so when he has to really emote. I didn’t particularly care for Randy McDowell’s performance at all. There is a side character, a jerk of a cop, that seemed out of place in this story, and they didn’t seem to know what to do with Ronnie’s mother. There is a scene with her late in the film that seems like it is leading to something, and then she just disappears.

Not a terrible film. Worth watching if you need a mystery fix. But not great either.