Slow West (2015)

John Maclean's Slow West arrives as a revisionist Western, which is to say it takes the old frontier mythology and quietly dismantles it while nobody is looking. A Scottish boy named Jay wanders Colorado in pursuit of Rose, a woman who regards him as a little brother, and hires a bounty hunter who is secretly escorting him toward a two thousand dollar reward. The film is an absurdist, melancholy thing, funny in the way that a long walk through bad weather is funny, and it ends in a shootout that kills nearly everyone worth caring about. It won the World Cinema jury prize at Sundance, which tells us the festival circuit has a reliable appetite for handsome sadness.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is largely abstinent. Kalani Queypo appears as Kotori, a protector of Rose and her father, and Madeleine Sami turns up in a small role, so the cast is not monochrome, though these are period-appropriate frontier figures and nothing more. Native Americans are chased, wounded, and killed as part of the harshness of the setting, not as the subject of a thesis. There is no queer thread, no environmental sermon, no meditation on the body or the mind's wiring, and the bounty money that drives the plot is never held up as a symptom of anything larger. Caren Pistorius's Rose is competent with a pistol when the moment demands it, which is a character trait, not a manifesto.

The film's one genuine act of subversion is against its own genre. It takes the Western's heroic vocabulary and replaces it with accident, miscommunication, and pointless death. That is genre deconstruction, not historical rewriting, and it carries no lecture. Maclean shows us a burned cabin and a boy bleeding in the grass and trusts us to draw our own conclusions. The result is a quiet, strange, beautifully photographed film that has no interest in instructing anyone. We are left to sit with it.