Slow West

The American Western has been so ingrained in the imagination of filmmakers that they are made all over the world. Of course we know about those made in Italy and Spain, buy Slow West, a dandy little oater from 2015, was filmed in New Zealand, but set in Colorado. It was written and directed with panache by John Mclean.

Kodie Smit-McPhee plays a young Scottish man who has come to the wild west to find his beloved, who fled Scotland with her father after he accidentally killed a lord. How he knew where she was is a little fuzzy, but the lad intrepidly rides west, not fully understanding what he's getting into.

He's saved from a band of marauders by a mysterious man, Silas (Michael Fassbender), who offers himself as a chaperone for money. Smit-McPhee sees the sense in this, and the two head on together. Secretly, though, Fassbender is a bounty hunter, and Smit-McPhee is leading him straight to his girl, who has a price on her head, dead or alive.

There are Indians and many more bounty hunters involved, and the ending is a well choreographed siege of a small house (one bounty hunter orders his men to "Kill that house") with desperadoes hiding in a cornfield, popping up and down like something in a video game. Fassbender, who starts as cold as a stone, will of course change his mind about Smit-McPhee and about life in general.

The body count is high, by Mclean does something interesting--at the end of the film he shows us each corpse, where it lay murdered, all the way back to the beginning of the film. In this way he reminds us that these were all human beings, someone's child, perhaps someone's parent. It is touching and makes one feel a little bit guilty about cheering on some of these killings.