Come With Me (2026)
Directed by Aaron Harvey
Screenplay by Harvey & Jonathan Croom
Starring Theo Rossi, Ron Perlman, Ronnie Gene Blevins, & Kate French.

Drama / Thriller

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

Aaron Harvey’s Come With Me centres on Simon Ward (Theo Rossi), a working-class man who’s finding life a bit of a struggle. He and his girlfriend Rebecca (Kate French) dream of having a family and owning a house but haven’t quite reached a place where they can afford their dreams. Simon finds himself increasingly drawn into the talk-radio world of Dalton Kirby (Ron Perlman), a so-called American patriot who spends his time ranting about America’s problems while promoting gun culture. As Simon’s life unravels one thread at a time, he spirals into a dangerous space while he’s all but hypnotised by Kirby’s political rhetoric.

Come With Me is a smart film that takes aim at American gun culture and the dangers that men with microphones unleash while hiding behind ideas like free speech. Simon epitomises the psychological conditioning that’s currently happening to boys and men in America at the hands of grifters who get wealthy by stirring up hatred and violence without repercussions. Come With Me is a diagnosis of some of the things currently troubling the American male psyche, and unfortunately the prognosis feels terminal.

Kirby rants and raves about patriotism while blaming “the working man” for allowing American society to go to shit. Most troubling is that he mixes all this with gun worship. As Kirby continually pushes guns, he uses definitively American imagery. One scene features Kirby on the radio with a hunter guest as they discuss the best ammo for hunting. Kirby talks about the “Boone and Crockett club,” a reference to Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, two settler-colonialist American frontiersmen and two of the earliest American folk heroes. Here, Kirby is, at best, inadvertently invoking white settler-colonialism, and, at worst, purposefully conjuring up ideas about a White America. While Kirby claims he doesn’t factor race into his worldview, he early on laments the fact that “We conquered empires,” which isn’t an American patriot idea, it’s the exact rhetoric a lot of white American racists spew when they try to claim that white people built the world. Nevertheless, Kirby points out how, since the earliest days of America’s colonisation, America has always been gripped by its deep, dark love of the gun.

Come With Me is a disturbing look at how men tumble into social paranoia and potential violence, particularly when they isolate themselves psychologically by finding solace in a man like Kirby—as well as men like Alex Jones and Donald Trump, to name only a couple of far too many—who claims he’s the only one “that tells the truth.” At a couple pivotal points, Simon echoes Kirby’s words, incapable of even forming thoughts to call his own, which reflects the brainwashing of so many American men by other men with microphones, from Alex Jones to Andrew Tate to Nick Fuentes—ironically, those same men who bleat out the words and phrases of provocateurs like sheep love to tell the rest of us we’re brainwashed. Come With Me is a frightening perspective on how men like Kirby hypnotise damaged, fragile men into feeling disenfranchised, yet they take no responsibility for the real-world terror they help create. The best aspect of Kirby’s character is how the film illustrates the way in which these angry male provocateurs are exactly like the politicians they claim to loathe. This is painfully depicted in a scene when Simon tries to speak with Kirby at the radio station but gets denied as he’s simultaneously urged to become a donor because Kirby likes them most. While men are being told by angry men behind microphones that they have to step up to “protect our country, our communities,” they’re also forced to understand that class dictates power; poor men might still be men, but to guys like Kirby and most politicians, a poor man doesn’t have the capital to be anything more than a follower, a sheep to lead to slaughter.

“Who is America?”

We see two separate instances of male gun violence by two different men in Come With Me: one directed inward, the other directed outward; the only possible results of a gun-loving culture that points men more towards violence rather than towards healthy coping mechanisms such as therapy, or even talking openly and genuinely to other men about their mental health. Kirby’s rhetoric is just vague enough for him to plausibly deny he’s trying to encourage violence, just as none of the right-wing mouthpieces injecting hate into the American male bloodstream ever take responsibility after a mass shooting or a hate crime they’ve clearly urged on. Come With Me is so compelling and equally upsetting because while it’s a fictional story, it’s a story that plays out in real life time and time again. Right now, there are many men across America like Simon who are one prominent culture-war grifter podcast episode or social media post away from acting out their darkest impulses.