Due West Review: A Very Modern Western

For all its ancient skylines and sun-battered roadside signs that haven’t seen a lick of paint since LBJ was in office, Due West is a film of modern West Texas. The kind of West Texas where, if you don’t know someone’s face, then you’ll know their car, because everyone’s keeping the same old beater on the road for 20 years. Those that don’t know their friendly hard-luck bartender (Adrianne Palicki) from popping tops on Lone Stars know her from that beat-up ’93 F-150 that barely rolls. Like she tells her mechanic, if she had something better – or, more importantly, could afford something with less mileage and fewer problems – she’d be long gone.

And she has a new problem, one that needs solving fast and is going to take the kind of cash that she doesn’t have, and the kind of problem that doesn’t get solved in Texas.

That’s the startling ingenuity of Due West, the debut feature from Houston filmmaker Evan Miller. Used to be that a story about life on the edge of the law told on the edges of the Lone Star State could be solved with a quick draw and a hail of bullets. Leastways, that’s what the recent cinematic mythology of the West was all about. But go back before the era of the oater and the gun-toting heroes, and many Westerns were bleak stories of survival and loss, about being in a place where the benefits of civilized society just aren’t available. That’s exactly where Palicki’s nameless Woman finds herself, sending ambiguous texts about covert meetups. She’s clearly up to something of which the law would not approve. Not that there is much law here, just prying eyes, wagging tongues, and judgment.

The star of Friday Night Lights may be best known for comedies like The Orville, Quasi, and the Austin-made The Salamander King and action classics such as John Wick, but for Due West Palicki gives a truly exposed performance as someone keeping her secret very close to her chest. It’s definitely something that she doesn’t want her already resentful sister-in-law, Mindy (Odette Annable, Walker), or local preacher Pastor Mike (Henry Thomas, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The Haunting of Bly Manor) to know about. It’s also the film’s secret, revealed in a way that’s intended to recontextualize the cowboy ethos of one brave soul caught in a no-win situation, and only themselves to depend upon. Strangers are enemies, allies come unexpectedly, and as in Western classics like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and half the episodes of Gunsmoke, the real villain is unrestrained macho bravado.

Miller and cinematographer Jonathan Nicholas (America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders) don’t go hard on ten-gallon hats and six-shooter symbolism, even if the opening shot – Palicki, jeans, cowboy boots, plaid shirt and a smoke, leaning against the wall of a neon-drenched dive bar – is pure modern Western symbolism. The only horse in sight is petted by a wide-eyed Austinite (Ciara Bravo, Cherry, A Teacher) who picks the Woman up when she’s hitchhiking to her destiny. The Woman pays her back in gas, road snacks, and hard-earned wisdom about how a girl on her own can’t let her guard down for a second, and that’s the first inkling that her peril doesn’t come from some black-hatted cackling gunslinger. Instead, the oppressive masculinity is pervasive, leaving her watching the clock for her own private showdown like Gary Cooper in High Noon.

Those moments allow Due West to be quietly nakedly political, but in a way that never feels like a lecture. Instead, the Woman’s predicament is both personal and universal, explaining an everyday tragedy in a fashion that cuts through rhetoric. Much as Texas should be ashamed of what it does to real-life women like the Woman, it should be proud of the filmmakers that told her story.

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This article appears in July 24 • 2026.