Slow West begins with a shot of the stars. A teenage boy, a stranger to the new world, lies on his back pointing a gun at the constellations. Stars bulge out as he mimes blowing them away.
It’s a fitting introduction to a film of cosmic delicacy: a fairytale in the guise of a black comedy in the guise of a Western, in which the grandeur of the landscape seems to mock the petty desperadoes traversing it. Directed by ex-Beta Band member John Maclean and produced by Michael Fassbender, who stars, Slow West has a tone all its own: perched bravely but assuredly on a knife’s edge between the poetic and ridiculous.
Part of what makes it so distinctive is Robbie Ryan’s widescreen photography, with New Zealand subbing in for Colorado circa 1870. This Old West is more verdant than the one we’re used to. The sun shines brighter, and there’s colour everywhere you look.
The boy, played by our own Kodi Smit-McPhee, is a Scottish aristocrat who’s crossed the world in search of his lost love. She’s on the lam in America after an accidental death for which she and her father were blamed back in Scotland. Fassbender turns up as Silas, who dispatches a few Injun-hunters to prove his bona fides and then offers to chaperone the boy for a price as he travels westwards.
For all its majestic vistas this is not a portentous film. Jed Kurzel’s score is almost sprightly, as though we’re watching the new adventures of Huck and (an admittedly more taciturn, cigarillo-chomping) Jim.
Slow West is full of discursions, but they never feel as though they’re straining for quirky affect. Ben Mendelsohn wanders into to the pair’s encampment, bringing absinthe as well as his trademark off-kilter menace, and he and Fassbender get roaring drunk. The next morning Silas and the boy wake to find they’re in the middle of a flood. The next shot sees the pair riding across the flats with the sun on their face, and a clothesline strung between the horses.
This is a film full of elemental scrabbling in which wry comedy is never far behind. It ends with a shootout for the ages: unpredictable, vivid, funny but lyrical too.
4/5 stars
Slow West opens in cinemas and at Sydney Film Festival on Thursday June 4.
