It’s all Clint Eastwood’s fault. 1992’s Unforgiven reinvented and rebooted the western, a genre that had long fallen into cliché. Unforgiven took the tired tropes and turned them around, showing the shades of gray that we didn’t see in our matinee movies of good guys in white hats and bad guys in black. And filmmakers have been following that lead ever since, with western-style movies telling much more nuanced stories with much more complex characters and often, much more violence too.
These three films all use the western genre, they’re all on Netflix and they all have 90% plus on Rotten Tomatoes, but they tell very different stories. Bone Tomahawk shares some of its DNA with From Dusk Till Dawn in its lurid, over-the-top violence, while The Furnace takes the familiar trope of gold-driven greed, transplants it to the Outback and uses it to shine a light on Australian history. And while Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog takes place beneath widescreen skies, the story it tells is much smaller and considerably more claustrophobic.
All could rank among the best Netflix movies – so see which one takes your fancy as the perfect weekend watch.
Bone Tomahawk
“Bone Tomahawk surges head first into violence with absolute courage and graphic disregard,” says Every Movie Has A Lesson, and that’s probably an understatement: this is an exceptionally violent movie that definitely isn’t for the squeamish. As Ireland’s The Herald put it: “For 100 minutes or so, Bone Tomahawk plays out as a clever and truly enjoyable Western… and then the film turns all kinds of nasty.”
The movie follows a small town sheriff (Kurt Russell) who leads a rescue mission to capture three people who have been abducted by a cannibalistic clan. The mission takes them into hostile territory, and things get messy. Very messy. But as Empire explains, despite scenes including “one spectacularly appalling cannibal dismemberment” the film is “as much a comedy as a cowboy horror film… Its influences veer all over the map, with stretches recalling the Coen brothers punctuated by echoes of Rob Zombie.”
The Power of the Dog
Adapted from Thomas Savage’s cult novel, The Power of the Dog is set on a ranch in 1925 and, according to Empire, “ruminates on the same romantic taboos, repression and visceral expressions of desire” as director Jane Campion’s much-loved The Piano. It centers on three key characters: Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), his brother’s new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and Rose’s son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and tells its story slowly as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood’s “scuffed guitar and sorrowful strings” provide the sparse soundtrack.
“What looks like it might become a love story turns out to be a tale of revenge,” The New Yorker says, adding that while the movie is “intensely beautiful” and “especially breathtaking” it’s also frightening and very intense. According to Columbus Alive the film “doesn’t just have one of the year’s best performances; it has four of them”, with Salon in full agreement: it’s “an exacting drama about masculinity, toxic and otherwise…. The strong performances and the striking visual style make this a potent piece of filmmaking.”
The Furnace
The story may sound familiar – gold-related greed leads to madness and violence – but The Furnace tells it very well; according to The Australian it’s “beautiful, even powerful, but rather bleak.” The debut movie by director Roderick MacKay is an Australian western set in the late 19th century with an impressively diverse cast and an interesting take on a well-worn story.
According to The Guardian it has echoes of the classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and critics agree that the movie features a superb central performance by David Wenham and Ahmed Malek as Mal and Hanif, the duo at the center of this “roadless road movie”.
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