End of Sentence review: John Hawkes and Logan Lerman’s healing road trip is familiar but effective

Dir: Elfar Adalsteins. Starring: John Hawkes, Logan Lerman, Sarah Bolger. 15, 96 mins

Families are torn apart more often by what isn’t said, rather than what is. And in End of Sentence, the feature debut of Icelandic filmmaker Elfar Adalsteins, the silence is deafening. Frank (John Hawkes) takes his wife Anna (Andrea Irvine), who’s dying of cancer, to visit their son Sean (Logan Lerman) in prison and say a few final goodbyes. But Frank never steps inside. He lingers on the threshold, carefully practising a normality that only makes sense to him. The guards are flummoxed.

Six months pass by and Anna is gone. She leaves only her ashes and a dying wish that the men in her family would, together, travel to her homeland in Ireland and scatter her among its crystal waters. End of Sentence sets itself on such a familiar path that the entire film seems hinged on the expectation that these two men will set aside their differences by journey’s end. And while Michael Armbruster’s script is both delicately written and magnificently acted by its cast, it’s always at its weakest when is treats this conclusion as an inevitability. Frank and Sean are never forced into the kind of long and messy confrontations that feel akin to emotional blood-letting: agonising to experience, yet cathartic in hindsight.

Instead, we learn of their rift through smaller, more controlled bursts of emotion. Sean believes that Frank enabled his grandfather’s abuse, which he still carries with him, in a constellation of cigarette burns on his back. His resentment has festered and grown new monstrous heads – now Sean can only think of his meek and mild-mannered father as a coward, while his own propensity towards violence threatens to turn him into the very man who tortured him.

These emotions can take years to deconstruct, but they’re given limited space in a film this enamoured with the conventions of the road trip genre. Frank and Sean, at one point, cross paths with Jewel (Sarah Bolger), a mysterious hitchhiker escaping an abusive relationship who becomes a romantic foil for both men. She exists solely in service to their pain, so that we never understand where she’s running to or what she’s left behind – as if those things simply never mattered in the first place.

And yet, despite these flaws, End of Sentence still delivers in its final moments, thanks to Hawkes and Lerman’s ability to carve meaning into the spaces between words. Here, anger is laced with wounded gentility, so that even at their worst, these characters remain empathetic. Both actors remain conscious and in tune with what the other is doing, so that their contrasts form a dialogue with each other.

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Hawkes, a brilliantly versatile actor, plays Frank as a human scarecrow. He’s been strung out by the world and left constantly searching for danger. Lerman stoops low to the ground, brimming with nervous energy – while Frank may seem frozen in place, Sean is ready to bolt at any given moment. End of Sentence may resolve itself a little too neatly to stay true to these broken men and the scars of their past, but Hawkes and Lerman’s performances speak eloquently to the way abuse lingers inside a person’s soul.