Slow West **** (2015, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender, Ben Mendelsohn, Caren Pistorius) – Movie Review

Kodi Smit-McPhee stars in writer and director John Maclean’s 2015 Western film Slow West as a 16-year-old Scots boy called Jay who journeys across 19th-century frontier America in search of the girl he loves. Michael Fassbender also stars as Silas, a mysterious drifter who saves his life and accepts the job of getting him to the girl – alive.

Ben Mendelsohn co-stars as the evil Payne, who is dogging the duo with his band of ruffians, and Caren Pistorius plays Rose, the feisty girl Jay loves. Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s a massive $2000 bounty on the heads of Rose and her father John Ross (Rory McCann). They’re wanted dead or alive, and, in these Western parts, that means wanted dead or dead. That’s going to make it very difficult for them to stay alive, or anyone else, it turns out.

Taut, tense, playful but also vicious, Slow West is great!! After Mads Mikkelsen’s The Salvation (2014), the Western is back! I could have done with another half hour of it. McPhee and Fassbender make a brilliant odd-couple duo, in a dynamic partnership. Mendelsohn doesn’t have a lot of screen time, but he makes it all count – he’s creepy and eventually chilling.

John Maclean does a perfect job on both writing and directing in his first feature film, and it looks great too in the New Zealand filming. The only downside is the rotten, unexplained title. It isn’t at all slow paced, Fast West would be a better title. It’s all packed in in just 84 cool minutes.

Slow West won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival 2015. It was filmed in the South Island of New Zealand.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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Kodi Smit-McPhee as Thomas ‘Tolly’ Johnson in the 2015 TV mini-series Gallipoli.