Slow West (15)
Directed by John Maclean
4/5

IF EVER a film title was — unintentionally? — apt, it’s Slow West.

John Maclean’s feature debut runs just 84 minutes, relatively brief compared with many films today.

But, while plenty happens, the storytelling tends to drag.

Fortunately Robbie Ryan’s terrific location cinematography helps compensate for narrative hiatuses in a film which writer-director Maclean describes as being “mostly about young love and also a coming of age story … a Western seen through Scottish eyes with an outsider’s perspective.”

The Scottish eyes belong to Kodi Smit-McPhee’s 16-year-old Scottish aristocrat Jay Cavendish. He falls for farmer’s daughter Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius) and then sets off for 19th-century Colorado to find his lost love when her father flees to the US after a tragedy.

Enter the mysterious and murderous gunslinger Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) who agrees to protect the greenhorn for money. As one would expect, the Wild West becomes wilder by the minute, with guns blazing and the body count mounting.

While European film-makers added spaghetti and tapas to the mix, Westerns remain a key US genre since 1903’s The Great Train Robbery. Slow West, however, is resolutely not indigenous. This New Zealand-UK production lacks US actors or settings, and is off-key in consequence.

But Smit-McPhee is effective as the love-driven lad, ditto Fassbender and Australian Ben Mendelsohn as the key villain Payne. True, 1870 was a period when European immigrants went west in the US but the protagonists never really convince as westerners. And while Colorado is well enough recreated via some arresting New Zealand locations, Slow West never feels truly indigenous.

That said, blazing gunplay, particularly during the bloody shoot-out that marks the climactic siege of the cleanest shack the Wild West has ever seen, hits the mark.

Maclean’s debut is impressive. Hopefully next time his subject matter will too.