If not quite in the top tier of 21st-century westerns, this supernatural oater from director Ned Crowley has a distinctive silhouette. First off, the film is beautifully shot, from the opening scene, which tracks back from a hallucinatory landscape until we see the source of a strange sound: a riffled deck of cards in a desperado’s hands. And its central conceit – a little girl (Emily Katherine Ford) whose touch is fatal – flowers into an intriguing metaphor for the consequences of the white man’s burden.
Except here the girl is, initially, a black woman’s burden. Formerly enslaved Sarah (DeWanda Wise) runs a homestead on the edge of an Arizona town in a plague-stricken time. The already on-edge locals shun her and her daughter, even though she keeps her child’s apparently deadly hands gloved. Increasingly ground down, Sarah enlists mentally shattered doctor Bender (Guy Pearce) – who ethers himself to sleep every night after his own family tragedy – to escort them across the wilderness to see a preacher to exorcise this dark force. A sour rationalist, he scoffs at her scheme – but he’s happy to take her money.
Crowley keeps the focus on the old west’s outcast and marginalised – with Sarah and Bender joined by loquacious farmhand Edward (Jack Alcott); Bender calls him a “simpleton”, but we’d now recognise him as autistic. So their trek is less a strident Searchers-style moral crusade than a procession of oddball encounters reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 western Dead Man (the influence is a little too obvious when, like that film’s William Blake, they take up with a literary-named guide).
The film is never far from a spasm of extreme violence, though – for which Crowley, who also co-wrote, often assigns white responsibility. Sometimes he insists on this a little too bluntly, but he develops the idea into something richly suggestive as the exact nature of the girl becomes unignorable. Brought into the world thanks to an act of white original sin, she seems to represent some satanic principle at work in the brutality and death all around. Perhaps Bender’s steadfast scepticism, refusing to acknowledge evil, is a form of self-protection from the notion of his own complicity. Pearce hits the notes of defensive self-denial sharply in the climactic scenes, with Bill Pullman’s leering preacher in an enticing moral conflagration that tiptoes into Cormac McCarthy territory.
• Devil in the Dust is on digital platforms from 3 October and on DVD from 13 October.
