A western film set in Montana, filmed in New Zealand. A re-westernized examination, so the meta goes, about machismo — destructive mannerisms of maleness.

The movie unrolls like a silent era film. Every plot point made in pantomime deliberateness. So much so, you know by the middle of the movie what the ending will be. Unless, as my gang said, you sit in the back of the bus.

Wyoming in New Zealand. Coming to terms with changes of an age. A movie I’d hoped to rewatch. Instead, it is a movie I watched, will consider, probably not watch again. I’ve too many other films, books, tasks to do. I don’t think I will get more from another watching than from some other film a first time.

The movie in one scene: the rabbit in the pile of timbers. By now the masculine and the feminine are coming together to stick a post into the hole. A rabbit runs under a pile of timbers. A game begins: toss timbers aside until the rabbit runs. 

He can’t. He is injured. The female man lifts the rabbit to comfort it — seeing it is injured, snaps its neck. 

The clear morality point: men kill the weak . These two men are gay. One clearly, the other remaining hidden, like a dog in the distant hill— only some can see.

Not an easy point for the larger audience: the dangerous persons in this film are gay. perhaps that is just the contrarian me. The widower’s son is the killer. 

Toxic masculinity – come upance, originally told in 1967 by Thomas Savage. The movie is composed with simplified symbolism. References to the dead, the posers, the educated seer. It is of its time, the fading sixties, and the looking back to a baby-boomer whistle vision of the 20s.

Those who liked the film:

>> On April 6, 2023, it ranked number 15 on The Hollywood Reporter‘s list of the “50 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far),” calling it a “brilliantly uncomfortable chamber piece about corrosive masculinity fed by sexual repression” and a “psychodrama whose epic scope is echoed in its majestic landscapes.”

>>August 24, 2023, it ranked number 8 on Collider‘s list of “The 20 Best Drama Movies of the 2020s So Far,” saying that Campion “unravels an understated love story in the heart of the American west, and shows how forcing someone to conform can lead to tragic circumstances.”

>> The March 2022 issue of New York magazine included the film as one of “The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars”.

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