Slow West (John Maclean, 2015)

The Western vogue won't go away, but this wave has taken it on in the sense of an environment that's virtually sci-fi in terms of the diversity and sheer weirdness of the universe. Yet certain conventions are still beholden to. Hence, Slow West, with all its nods from El Topo down to the lowly likes of Seraphim Falls, contains ultraviolence and surrealism in equal measure, and this could be irritating indeed were it not for a simple backbone to the plot that remains constant. Once again, it ends up one of those films where, after all the beautiful scapes and ideas that suggest something larger, as probably the last thing the director wanted, i.e. simply a more thoughtful than average addition to the modern Western genre. You do have to sympathise with how hard it is to add anything more to the Western, though, or how once you've chosen that as your carrier of stories it ties up your hands.

6/10