The term “revisionist western” has been overused lately. However, this blend of slow-burning frontier feminism and taut home invasion thriller is probably the most authentically unorthodox take on the genre you will see for a while. British director Daniel Barber (Harry Brown) takes his time sketching the world inhabited by three southern women who live together towards the end of the American civil war. Sisters Augusta (Brit Marling) and Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) have been left to tend the family homestead, their father and brother having joined the Confederate army. Working alongside them is Mad (Muna Otaru), a slave whose change in status, now that the women are fenced in by foreboding, is one of the most satisfying elements of the film. “What if all the men killed all the other men?” Capable and stoic, Augusta is not given to self-pity but she, more than the other women, begins to sense that times have changed for ever.
Harbingers of that change are the feral soldiers (Sam Worthington, Kyle Soller) that she encounters while scouting for medicine. She eludes them once, but they track her. Barber’s measured pacing creates a sustained dread as the soldiers lay siege; the final explosion of violence has a touch of Tarantino-esque catharsis.
