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Slow West is full of pleasures. The visuals range from snow-capped peaks to rocky deserts (the Wild West seems to get a lot of weather), while the dialogue goes for wry and jauntily cynical. (Overheard at a trading post: "Got any meat?" "I got condemned bacon.") Just enough of the comedy survives to take the edge off the forelock-tugging.

This is not a film that revels in nostalgia, constantly harking back to the golden age of the genre... Rather, Slow West walks its own line, embracing some of the more time-honoured western archetypes and tropes while providing enough colourful narrative diversions to throw us off the scent. Maclean hasn't set out to make an iconic revisionist western for the ages, just a thoroughly entertaining ride across familiar terrain. A bittersweet modern ballad set to a steady, classical beat.

Even at a lean and pacy 83 minutes, Slow West feels compendious. There's everything here from John Ford mythmaking to Coen brothers mischief-making, plus the sinewy sparseness of Sergio Leone – and even a little of the pride-puncturing slapstick the genre has occasionally attracted in films like Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West and Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles.

This is a highly promising debut from writer-director John Maclean. The New Zealand scenery passes tolerably well for Colorado, and the cast of largely British, American and Antipodean actors effectively represents the ethnic mix of the American west at the time.

SLOW WEST is dark, violent, claustrophobic, and pessimistic but these qualities are also thankfully leavened by MacLean's singular gift for humorous sight gags--such as the moment Jay and Silas stumble across the corpse of a man who died chopping down a tree, Jay's innovative method of drying soaking-wet clothes or, best of all, a flashback sequence involving an outlaw criticizing his partner for being jealous of his "wanted" poster.

Writer-director John Maclean insists at every opportunity that the American west teemed with brutality and that every positive myth about the region was built on a lie, yet he doesn't deliver this familiar revisionist history with much force. The problem isn't his weak grasp of the period but his misguided decision to adopt a fairy-tale tone that amounts to needless sugarcoating.

Slow West" must be counted one of the most unintentionally ridiculous Westerns to come down the pike in a long, long while. From first till last, this tale of a hard-boiled bounty hunter helping a Scottish lad on his quest to find the woman he loves, who's on the lam in the old West, is a tissue of creaky contrivances and outright absurdities.

Slow West isn't slow so much as it's in no particular hurry. Maclean offers numerous digressions—some of them funny (like the seemingly random campsite anecdote above), others verging on didactic (as when Jay encounters an anthropologist with clunkily modern views concerning Native Americans). Smit-McPhee struggles with his Scottish accent, Fassbender struggles to find a character worthy of his talent, and Mendelsohn struggles not to let his wardrobe constantly upstage his dialogue.

It's possible that the only way we're prepared to imagine Western narratives today is with disabused knowingness, since the old heroic sensibilities of the pioneer legend no longer convince. But even so, Slow West, for all its bitter irony, does find a surprising way to restore a redemptive lick of romanticism to the dark picture—to find "hope for the West," as the payoff line has it.

It may not flaunt the unearned sense of self-seriousness of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but as it builds toward its climax, of bodies rising and falling in synchronicity to the dance of bullets overhead, and of blood perfectly splattering across walls, it still only suggests a pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.

Slow West is positively — in every sense of the word — disconcerting. Which is precisely Scottish filmmaker John Maclean's ballsy aim. Wildly but meticulously blurring the boundaries between genres, he compels an adjustment of expectations.

Accomplished as the filmmaking is, on a certain level the movie feels more like a meticulously constructed cinephile curio than a fully immersive adventure. Despite the natural splendor of the outdoor imagery, shot with a typically superb eye by Robbie Ryan, there's an almost deliberate sense of artifice to the composition of the action and the blocking of bodies within the frame... If that distance robs the picture of some emotional force, there's no denying the visceral power of the finale.