“Ah-yup. Reckon this’ll be a mite easier once somebody gets round to inventin’ razors.”
In the final frames of Slow West, the camera pauses over the bodies of all the characters that have died. In quick, static shots, the audience is reminded of every corpse—those of major characters and incidental figures alike—that contributed to the movie’s body count. That tally is substantial: Slow West is a story of guns and horses and men, and a woman or two—a western, albeit a contemporary, art-laced, off-kilter one. (Can we stop calling every western that’s been made since The Wild Bunch “postmodern” or “revisionist”? This particular genre has obviously found substantial room for mutation since John Wayne’s heyday.) But Slow West isn’t a film that wallows in the genre’s inherent violence…