Is there anything more perversely thrilling in American cinema than the spectacle of watching a tough man—whose life’s been varnished in blood and bad decisions—suddenly confronted with the plummeting black-out of his mind? “Knox Goes Away,” Michael Keaton’s brooding directorial vehicle (and, yes, he pilots this thing from both sides of the camera), is, at heart, a haunting, slow-burn elegy for the hired gun as the light in his memory flickers and gutters.
The premise could have been nothing but pulp: an assassin, stuffed with secrets and regret, discovers that his mind is being rapidly hollowed by Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease—an illness so swift and merciless that it seems tailor-made for the genre’s most metaphysical yearning. Yet what gnarled its way into me as the film unraveled was just how moving—and, yes, even tender—Keaton’s vision is beneath all the loaded hardware and procedural gristle. You don’t just watch “Knox Goes Away”; you live in its fuzzy, unreliable present, lungs full of dread as the orderly weeks tick down like a death knell.
Keaton’s John Knox: less a cold-blooded killer, more a ghost discovering the edges of his own unraveling. There’s something raw here—a vulnerability that radiates out from Keaton’s performance, as though he’s meticulously peeling the skin off his own reputation as an actor and letting the nerves show through. The camera lingers on his confusions, his vacant scrabblings after the facts of his own life, turning the film’s so-called slow pacing into a virtue: each muddled instant means something. Here’s a thriller that’s not afraid to circle the true horror—not the violence but the extinction of identity, moment by trembling moment.
And tell me, when was the last time a “crime picture” had the nerve to make you feel the real ache of memory loss? Not just as a cheap device to drive you from one set-piece to the next but as the main event—the ground zero of the film’s existential anguish. The audience is squeezed right into that haze; by the second “week” marker, I felt less like I was following the story than stumbling after Knox through the corridors of his vanishing mind. Flashes of violence burst out of the shadows, but it’s the quiet, fumbling intervals—Knox running his hands over objects he can’t remember, faces he can’t quite claim as his own—that leave the biggest bruises.
The supporting cast orbit Keaton’s disintegration with varying degrees of gravity. There’s James Marsden, giving us a son (Miles) whose wounds run decades deep—each scene father and son share quivers with the implication that maybe the real violence in this film happened off-screen, years ago, in the chilly hinterland between neglect and apology. The entire emotional schema of “Knox Goes Away” riffs on the central tension: can redemption possibly arrive at the eleventh hour, and who’s buying it anyway? These father-son scenes aren’t sentimental; they’re loaded, hesitant, bruised with the kind of regret that stings in the morning.
When Keaton surrounds himself with the likes of Al Pacino’s devilish, ambiguous Xavier Crane—a man whose every utterance is a blend of threat and old man mischief—he finds both a confessor and a mirror. It’s delightful and unnerving: the film is wired with double-crosses and confessions, and just when I thought I’d mapped out all the familiar genre potholes, Poirier’s screenplay swerves and whips out a switchblade. The film doesn’t just want to tell you a story; it wants to rearrange how you feel about the story as it goes, shifting sympathies, hiding its hearts in unholy places.
Keaton’s style leans away from the glib, neon-lit posturing of modern thrillers. The direction is unshowy but precise—close-ups that crawl right into a face’s landscape, shadows that crawl up the walls as if to swallow the last of Knox’s memories. There’s precious little melodrama. Even the odd moments of police-procedural fatigue (because yes, there are a few stock corners here, the detective with something to prove, a witness or two reading off the menu) barely manage to slow the momentum—that mounting, inescapable sense of dread, as if the entire film were struggling not just against the ticking clock, but against the erasure of story itself.
The slow pacing is the big gamble. If you’re the sort who wants your redemption stories shot from a cannon, you might chew the edges off your seat waiting for the payoff. But the stillness serves a purpose: by the time the film reaches its last, devastating hand-off—Knox, a hollow shell in a medical ward, the family fortunes disbursed, the old lives forever out of reach—there’s a weight that sticks in your chest. You feel not just the cost of violence, but the almost intolerable fragility of memory, the wasted possibilities of a man who could only find purpose as everything slipped away.
Faces fade; intentions blur; even love is equivocal in this twilight. Redemption is a last-minute heist, a trick pulled right under the nose of annihilation. This is less about the settling of accounts than about what’s left unspoken, even at the end.
So yes, “Knox Goes Away” has imperfections. Occasionally the plot cuts corners, a supporting character or two seems borrowed wholesale from the “crime drama starter kit,” and some plot mechanics creak as Knox maneuvers his slow, spectral exit. But these are asides—background noise to the film’s beating heart. What lingers is Keaton’s performance and his direction: not showboating, not shouting, just the bare, quaking man left behind as the world forgets him.
It’s a B-picture in a trench coat that wants to be poetry—and damn if, in some wintry moments, it doesn’t get there. Keaton’s moonlit confessions, Pacino’s twinkling menace, Marsden’s dammed-up fury—all circling the empty space where memory used to be.
You come out of “Knox Goes Away” less certain of yourself than when you went in. That, after all, is the point. Every piece of this movie aches toward that one essential thing movies can sometimes give us: the sense not merely of watching a story, but of riding its dissolution, trembling on the verge of forgetting—haunted, furious, and alive.
See it. Let it unsettle you. Let it make you remember what matters before the lights in the mind go out.
