Dark humour pervades this gritty western as naive teenager Jay Cavendish, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee – whose role in The Road may have prepared him for these harsh landscapes peopled by harsher characters – searches for his estranged sweetheart, who alas has a price on her head.
Rescued from a vicious bandit (Mendelsohn), and henceforth accompanied by Silas, a roughneck drifter (the ever-excellent Fassbender) with an agenda all his own, Jay eventually learns what it is to be a man in an unyielding world.
John Mclean, whose 2009 short Man On A Motorcycle also featured Fassbender, writes and directs his first feature – shot in New Zealand – with a keen grasp of dramatic reversal and the visual majesty of the Old West, to gripping and quietly magnificent ends.
