Despite having something of a love for mythic America I haven’t really explored the western genre in as much detail as I maybe should have, though I have enjoyed the main ones I’ve seen from True Grit (both versions) to The Hateful Eight, Django and The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, and now Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s 2015 Oscar winner, The Revenant.
Going in I’ll admit I knew very little about the film beyond the fact that it won and was nominated for a good few awards and that somewhere along the way it featured star Leonardo DiCaprio fighting a bear.
Thankfully this scene comes fairly early on and really is the catalyst for the bulk of the film to follow which is a genuinely visceral evocation of the American frontier in the early 1800s when white ‘frontiersmen’ were exploring the westernmost borders of the ‘civilised’ world and generally fighting and killing their way there and back again.
The film opens with DiCaprio, as real life character Hugh Glass, hunting some form of elk with his half native son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), before, in short order, all hell breaks loose as a native tribe attack the band of hunters and trappers Glass belongs to and a massacre ensues.
The way Iñárritu and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, capture this is simply breathtaking as we get what feels like a point of view experience of the battle with arrows and buckshot whizzing back and forth as limbs are hacked at, horses fall from beneath their riders and general chaos reigns.
This rather sets the tone, visually at least, as throughout what follows we often feel as if we are there, in the film, in a way almost unlike any film I’ve seen before, particularly when, after the bear attack, Glass is left for dead and we follow his attempt to return to what might, debatably, pass for civilisation – this may have something to do with the fact that Lubezki chose to light the whole film with natural light, making it all a truly astonishing achievement.
Along with the tense and intimate visuals, which are brilliantly contrasted by some amazing vistas of the winter scenery that put Tarantino’s work in The Hateful Eight to shame, DiCaprio’s performance matches this in spectacular fashion.
With very few entirely coherent lines following the attack, he huffs and puffs and hacks and coughs, at best limping all the while, across the wilderness encountering pretty much every set back you can think of, and he is mesmerising in all of it.
In the hands of some this could easily become overdone or melodramatic but DiCaprio finds the truth of it leading to a final shot of the film that is genuinely startling.
Along with him, the film’s antagonist (after the bear is dealt with) comes in the of John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy, who once again transforms himself almost entirely while his wild eyes stare out from beneath his brutally cropped hairline in a way that feels they are piercing the screen making the man almost monstrous at points.
All of this, along with what feels like a surprisingly well balanced depiction of what might be called race relations of the time, makes The Revenant a hugely impressive piece of work that treads the fine line between history and myth that marks out the American Wild West as such a fascinating era while feeling like an exploration of the human capacity for survival and revenge.
Tommy Girard 
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