A lone cowboy holding a silver balloon crosses an empty prairie on a sluggish horse.

His direction of travel echoing his name and that of his estranged daughter towards whom he is travelling: the titular Lefty (Marty Grace Dennis) and Righty (Lewis Pullman, whose recent turn as the droll concierge in Bad Times At The El Royale is a joy to behold).

The reason for their strained rendezvous? A final visit to his dying father whose blank stare and fixed expression are at odds with the rodeo-bucking snaps by his bedside. The “get well soon” balloon which he and his four shaggy brothers tug like a lame nag is brought more in hope than expectation.

“Where does he go now?” asks an inquisitive Lefty after the inevitable. “I don’t know really,” her father’s bewildered response. “Slips into something else, I guess. Maybe a big, tall pine tree somewhere with a real nice view. I don’t know.”

Other than one-word exchanges – the most comical of which is Righty’s terse conversation with his ex-wife (Charlotte Delpit) and her new partner (Sam Burgess) which is reduced to a transaction of names – this is the longest passage of dialogue in writer and director Max Walker-Silverman’s impressive short which as well as being selected for this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival has earned him a prestigious award from the NYU film school.

As the old saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words. And Alfonso Herrera Salcedo’s cinematography together with David Massachi’s editing capture the underside of the iceberg which grinds beneath the smooth surface of the unspoken.

The natural sounds of birds in the breeze and crickets in song in sharp contrast to the ticking of a wall clock and beeping of a mobile phone, the latter of which produced by a dismissive swipe. The contrast symbolising the disconnect between Righty and the ties that loosely bind.

“Where do we go now?” asks Lefty. For Righty, into the dusty distance like the title of the closing track “Poor Boy Long Way From Home”. For Max Walker-Silverman, onwards and upwards.

Director: Max Walker-Silverman
Writer: Max Walker-Silverman
Stars: Lewis Pullman, Marty Grace Dennis, Charlotte Delpit Hacke

Peter Callaghan
Latest posts by Peter Callaghan (see all)