Slow West (2015)

by - July 6th, 2015 - Blu-ray and DVD

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How does the Blu-ray/DVD Disc stack up? (all ratings out of 10.)
  • Movie8
  • Video9
  • Audio10
  • Extras3
  • Overall8

SYNOPSIS

“He loved you with all his heart.”

–      Silas Selleck

CRITIQUE

Here’s what I wrote about this one in my original theatrical review:

Slow West (2015)

Slow West (2015)

“Scotsman Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has come to the United States to be reunited with the woman he loves, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Making the slow trek into the sparsely inhabited western expanses of the still young country, he is taken under the wing of loner Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), the gunslinger agreeing to take the wilderness neophyte to his destination for a $100 in cold, hard cash.

Silas has his additional reasons for wanting to find Rose, his fortune in finding Jay going to make his search all the easier. But he’s not the only one on the woman and her grizzled father John’s (Rory McCann) trail, cutthroat bounty hunter Payne (Ben Mendelsohn) and his bloodthirsty band of associates keen to track the pair down as well. Not that Silas is going to share this information with his new acquaintance, instead perfectly content to make the journey westward with Jay clueless as to just how lethally high the danger level actually is.

Writer/director John Maclean’s debut feature Slow West is a cold, stark Western that does the genre proud. Displaying an uncanny sense of time and place while also showcasing a darkly absurdist sense of humor that’s as pitch black as it is uncomfortably silly, the movie is a beautifully destructive drama that builds to a freewheeling, bullet-riddled conclusion that devastates in its emotional callousness. The film is gloriously shot by Robbie Ryan (Philomena) and even more exquisitely scored by composer Jed Kurzel (The Babadook), while editors Roland Gallois (The Hunter) and Jon Gregory (In Bruges) team up to put the pieces together with astonishing precision.

For Maclean, the whole film is a delicate, modestly paced balancing act, the pitch black humor confidently juxtaposed between both the blossoming friendship developing between Jay and Silas as well as the coldhearted depravity lurking at all times just outside the frame. While never spelling things out the filmmaker still plants a number of clues revealing aspects of his central characters’ personalities, all of which, while never becoming completely clear, starts to come into powerful focus as the pair finally stands face-to-face with Rose.

It is almost too austere at times, and flashbacks to Jay and Rose in Scotland, while arguably important, almost feel lifted from a completely different motion picture. There’s also a bizarre sequence involving a conversation between Silas and Payne while one of the pair is under the influence of absinthe, all of it leading to a boneheaded mistake it’s difficult to believe a killer of either’s stature would end up making. It almost feels as if this surrealistic turn of events only exists to increase the level of danger for Jay and Silas as they reach their destination, this one incident arguably the only inauthentic moment the film offers up.

Slow West (2015)

Slow West (2015)

Thankfully, it ends up not mattering terribly much, Maclean unleashing a furiously magnetic finale that’s full of heart stopping surprises. Things do not go entirely as expected, the filmmaker defying convention as heroes and villains trade places and acts of unimaginable valor happen in the same moment life leaves the body. It’s stupendous, Fassbender (who was born to be in a Western), Mendelsohn, Pistorius and especially Smit-McPhee collectively rising to the occasion each delivering a performance in these climactic seconds that left me dumbstruck in awe.

I’m not entirely sure what Maclean was doing before this (his credits on IMDB range from a BAFTA-winning short film, Pitch Black Heist, to helping write a few of the songs appearing in movies as diverse as High Fidelity and Remember Me). What I do know is that I’m eager to see whatever he has up his sleeve next. As debuts go, Slow West is a stupendous one, the film an elegiac Western triumph both fans of the genre and newcomers alike will hopefully enjoy in equal measure.”

Slow West is a superior Western featuring superlative performances from Fassbender and Smit-McPhee and one that builds to a magnificent climax that stopped my heart cold. A tragically little seen gem released to theaters earlier this summer with too little in the way of fanfare, here’s hoping its reputation continues to grow now that it’s available on DVD and Blu-ray.

THE VIDEO

Slow West is presented on a dual-layer 50GB Blu-ray with a MPEG-4 AVC encode and a 1.66:1 1080p transfer.

THE AUDIO

This Blu-ray feature an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack and comes with optional English, English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

THE EXTRAS

Extras here include:

On Strange Land: Making Slow West (7:19) – Standard promo featurette featuring short snippet interviews with the cast and crew. Fine for what it is, nothing more than that.

Deleted Scenes

–      Hunter’s Cabin (4:35)
–      Am Bata Uaine Performed by Ali ‘Beg’ Macleod (4:09)

A code for a Digital HD Copy of the film is included with this release.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I really like Slow West. I have feeling I’ll grow to like it even more with the passing of time. Watch it at once.

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