Slow West

An untraditional or even intellectual slant on the western. Fassbender in a faultless slant on Clint’s Man with No Name is supported by an endearingly naïve Smit-McPhee. As for the story, nothing new, but the delivery is very neat. The wonderful landscape of New Zealand affords Slow West incredible colors. A joy to watch. The final reckoning is duly bloody, full of fitting deaths. Again it applies that chaos conceals order. (16/09/2017)

It has a bit of the Coen style (in a shorter release, Slow West would fit nicely in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), a bit of Jarmusch (I mean, of course, Dead Man). In the end it is a pleasantly short and beautifully atmospheric telling without a story, which is not a flaw in my book. Michael Fassbender's character would have been played by Clint Eastwood some forty to fifty years ago. (17/10/2020)

Western is a genre that I really appreciate, but its modern interpretation probably isn't for me. However, I have to admit that "Slow West" has something to it. There are excellent moments that are humorous and the film and its approach come across quite absurdly. I like this. The performances are well done and the story makes sense. So, it's good, but not excellent. (30/06/2015)

"I killed a woman." - "That is the risk of doing business." - "Does it not bother you to dine with a murderer?" - "If this were to bother me, I would be considerably lonely in life." The protagonist lives by a motto that shaped the history and face of the United States throughout the 19th century. "Go west, young man." The west, in the dynamic years after the Civil War, when the barriers of Southern landowners fell to penetrate the western territories, opportunity, future, but also wilderness, where the law of the strongest prevails and where there are many risks and inconveniences. The only chance of survival is to quickly learn from the more experienced folks, discard old habits, and have a good amount of luck. Slow West is an ideal western for those who found Jarmusch's hypnotically dreamy journey in Dead Man too static and lengthy. John Maclean does not waste time, and in a time when two-hour action films are the norm, he presents a runtime of only 84 minutes filled with dynamic storytelling, dirty characters, violence, and corpses. It must be admitted that this comes at the expense of character psychology and the reduction of potentially very interesting characters to disposable figurines. I would have appreciated it if the film were 15 minutes longer. Still, for me, it leaves a very decent 85% overall impression. (05/04/2021)

From the beginning it's quite irritating in its own way. And by that I don't just mean that you can only stomach Kodi Smith-McPhee on screen once a year at most, also it was mostly the implausible calling under the old school that really got on my nerves. In the very first scene with Fassbender, we're treated to the dictates of the film's frame (the characters only see what the viewer sees, however impossible that might be in reality), a pasted-together shot made up of close-ups and an extreme long shot (regardless of the fact that the film was shot on digital, which can prevent this), and action sequences pieced together from long cuts of static shots. All this in a crop with a ratio of 1.66: 1. Combined with the polished digital image, it comes across as a total wannabe, and I didn't get much out of the first act of the film through all the gnashing of teeth. In this case, though, the wait is worth it, because over the course of the appealingly tolerable running time we are treated to a deconstruction of both the characters and the American West, and the unbreakable power of love that seemingly drives the entire film. Despite the usual construct, based on a greenhorn in an unfamiliar world, through whom we are introduced to how it all works, here the greenhorn actually shows quite the initiative; and yet, of course, we end up paying for it because we ultimately discover that the story would have been fine without him because it was never about him in the first place. And being the hero of a romantic story that isn't about you is really, really depressing. (27/10/2015)