Scottish director John Maclean makes his feature debut with this coming-of-age romance, by way of the classic American Western, as seen through the eyes of an outsider. Young Scottish aristocrat Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) travels to Colorado in search of his love, the evocatively named Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Woefully underprepared for the American frontier, he is saved on the trail by a road-weary traveller, Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), who joins the quest as guide, protector, and, unbeknownst to Jay, bounty hunter with a sudden leg-up on the competition.

Fassbender and Smit-McPhee deliver magnetic performances as protagonists drifting between the contrary tides of hopeful determination and raw fatalism. Maclean adds to those conditions a thought-provoking mix of violence, black humor, sharp editing, and sumptuous landscape cinematography, with New Zealand serving as an admirable stand-in for the post-Civil War wilderness. Slow West becomes a taut critique of Manifest Destiny as a disruptive force, especially towards natives and immigrants finding themselves on the fringe of America’s drive for progress.

—Arthur Ryel-Lindsey