Star Rating:

Slow West

Director: John Maclean

Actors: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Caren Pistorius

Release Date: Friday 26th June 2015

Genre(s): Western

Running time: New Zealand minutes

The debut from former Beta Band founding member John Maclean is just as hard to pin down and categorise as his music.

It's late nineteenth century Colorado and bookish Scottish teenager Jay Cavendish (Smit-McPhee) makes his way through the hostile terrain in a bid to locate his beloved, Rose (Pistorious), who fled to America with her father (Rory McCann - Game of Thrones' The Hound) when he accidentally murdered a neighbour. With a price on their head and with bounty hunters searching for the fugitives (including Mendelsohn's ragbag outlaws), Jay encounters the sullen gunslinger Silas Selleck (Fassbender) who offers to lead the lovelorn kid to Rose...

Maclean has written a trippy western, that's both welcoming and emotionally distant. He is fascinated with the myth of the Old West but undercuts the it at every turn. Fassbender's introduction has him emerge ghost-like from the ash that swirls spookily through the air; there are the three elderly African men who have stopped to engage in a tribal tune; there's the writer who recounts the decline of the aboriginal tribes; and the framing that sees Smit-McPhee dwarfed by a mushroom. The body count is high but since all the deaths are delivered in such a low key fashion Slow West remains a quiet, contemplative film. Throughout there's the narration from Fassbender's Silas, the poetic lines clashing with his rough character.

At eighty-four minutes Slow West is trim. Perhaps too trim. The characters feel underdeveloped, as if there was more to them in scenes that didn't make the cut: when Jay is responsible for the death of the parents of two young children, there is an expectation that this guilt will play a part later, especially since Maclean insists on using the children later, but nothing ever comes of it. Maybe this adds to the trippiness - Slow West is determined not to be just another solid western - but it's a sizeable early moment that demands a payoff.

But with sound performances all around, the pretty look - the climactic corn field shootout and the aforementioned ash/forest sequences particularly eye-catching - and the sombre Americana soundtrack, Slow West has more going for it than it doesn't.