Slow West, an epic frontier story, is set in Colorado but was shot in the South Island.
In the closing moments of this deliciously unpredictable Western, set in Colorado but shot in the South Island, the camera revisits the scenes of the various killings that have punctuated the action.
There are plenty of them - the body count is around a dozen and a half, though most of them pile up in a climactic shootout that is equal parts absurdist and horrifying - but the tone of the sequence is more elegiac than grisly. "There's much more to life than just survival," one character tells us at the end, but he's quoting someone else, who is dead. And that's not the half of the irony that saturates the line.
A frontier story whose epic scope and title both belie its concise running time, Slow West, the feature debut of musician-turned-film-maker Maclean, is infused by a poetic, even mythic, sensibility that is as important as story; narrative plausibility falls off the horse a bit, but mostly manages to get back on.
The action and dialogue are often as cryptic and allusive as the characters. "In a short time, this will be a long time ago," says one character, though we later realise he's sounding a warning; in another sequence, a trio of French-speaking singing Congolese seem to have materialised in the middle of an open plain.
