Slow West review

A young Scot travels across America in search of his love.

Slow West is a really weird film.

It’s a Western certainly and filled with the kind of things you expect from the genre – there are guns and cowboys and injuns and bullets and bravado and all manner of dust kicked up by mounts and fights.

But it’s also a character piece, a quirky comedy and an arthouse flick under a bit of mainstream camouflage.

If nothing else it’s unpredictable, something which is unusual enough in such a well-established genre as the Western. That’s true of the characters which exist far from the standard tropes – even when you think they’re established.

Kodi Smit-McPhee is on a heroes quest, that much is obvious from the start. But the film plays with that simple judgement, especially toying with moral edge of the character. Then there’s Fassbender’s Silas – seemingly a simple hard-bitten sort. But there’s virtue in him which rears at unusual moments making him the unintentional centre of the film.

The simple plot takes in a journey to find a young woman (luminous Kiwi actress Caren Pistorious) and that’s about it. Along the way there are some complications, mostly down to interventions by a bounty hunting gang led by an underused but still marvellous Ben Mendelsohn.

First time writer and director John Maclean (who previously worked with Fassbender on two shorts) brings great visuals to his feature debut. It’s a more intimate kind of Western, with little of the epic sweep we’ve come to expect but there’s plenty of terrible beauty to be found in his frames, particularly in the closing scenes.

At 84 minutes Slow West isn’t a long film but it doesn’t feel particularly brief. It’s quite talky and even a tad pretentious at times while the moments of flamboyance sometimes feel a little curtailed by the budget. It’s guaranteed to fare better with arthouse folks than mainstream audiences, or the many fans of Fassbender who pretty much steals the show.