The Rover (David Michôd, 2014)

More truly unpeopled and hostile to life than any part of America, the Australian Outback is a fertile setting for dystopias where civilisation has collapsed, first seized on by Mad Max, of course, and this could almost be in the same universe as that series. Guy Pearce, building on an uncompromising character transition from pretty boy to grizzled Man with No Name, the latter more or less first seen as his outlaw in Hillcoat's The Proposition, is a tormented man with no apparent remaining purpose to live who goes off on a violent mission of vengeance after men who have stolen his car. Along the way, he picks up Robert Pattinson's twitchy, borderline halfwit criminal and the story proceeds in as direct a line as an Outback road to bloody retribution. Spartan and relentlessly nihilistic, it offers no redemption whatsoever, but does maintain a certain integrity in its refusal to fetishise.

6/10