Critics reviews

This is a well executed portrayal of gender-specific trauma. Haigh offers a searing cinematic dissection of the way that gender politics – and more pointedly, patriarchy – vests certain individuals (men) with greater agency that others (women), while avoiding the trap of either positioning women as purely passive subjects, or men as fully self-embodied agents.

While the narrative may be read as a coming-of-age story, there’s something more elemental in Charley’s search for a beloved aunt, who comes to represent his idealised yearning for a lost family life. Crucially, Charley remains at the centre of the picture, with the oblong 1.85 frame lending a human dimension to these expansive vistas, ensuring that we don’t get distracted by the scenery, or lose sight of the true focus of the story.

For all its sometimes over-episodic structure . . . Haigh has crafted a quietly affecting coming-of-age journey tale sustained by a central performance that never feels forced or contrived. And as a bittersweet, felt study in human-animal relations, comparison with Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008) doesn’t seem out of place.

Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete is a beautiful movie, not just about a boy and a horse, but about the courage of a young man dealing with harsh circumstances and careless, irresponsible adults.

Lean on Pete is a methodical and memorable film primarily because director Haight, adapting from Willy Vlautin’s novel, keeps a distance from his characters, never taking the easy route, and never, ever letting the movie enter the killing fields of the corny or cliched.

It’s unusual to have a movie as emotional as Lean on Pete use close-ups as sparingly as it does, but Haigh uses the big, empty landscapes Charley and Pete travel through to do some of this work for him.

At times, Haigh’s dialogue is prosaic to the point of barely mattering, but it shifts our focus to where it should be, on the impressionistic images (shot by Danish DP and first-time Haigh collaborator Magnus Nordenhof Jønck) and the striking array of faces and bodies that drift through them at various junctures.

This visual beauty can seem at odds with the story’s ugliness but is as necessary as it is welcome because it gives you something to hold onto even as Charley slips further, grubbing meals, fending off violence.

It’s... a muted, sometimes touching, other times arduous odyssey through impoverished parts of America that rarely show up on film. Lean on Pete has more of an epic scope than Haigh’s previous movies... But the film retains his skill for delving into tiny internal nuances... [and] When it’s at its subtlest, Lean on Pete sings with power; but when things get outwardly grim, it loses a little of its impact.

Beautifully subverting the form, Andrew Haigh has made an impeccably acted film as despairing as it is finally a bit hopeful, effortlessly involving us in the often disturbing struggle of a 15-year-old desperate to find the stability and security we all yearn for.

While the film’s semi-picaresque, road-trip nature might seem antithetical to the maker of such intimate dramas as “Weekend” and “45 Years,” Haigh brings his gifts as a filmmaker with him to the great outdoors, always capturing little moments of character and emotion even in an expanse of seemingly infinite American desert.

Haigh’s rhythms are singular, and Lean on Pete’s long back half stretches on with the harsh unpredictability of the Oregon-Idaho-Wyoming landscapes the boy and the horse trudge across. It’s harshly beautiful, liberated but deeply lonely. The worst happens, several times, but whenever it does the boy does all that any of us can do: He just keeps moving on.