Film Review: Brimstone

The title sequence of this bleak Western thriller tells a tale all of its own. This isn’t just Brimstone, it’s “Koolhoven’s Brimstone”. Through this relatively rare and audacious claim of cinematic ownership, Dutch director Martin Koolhoven aligns himself with the similarly credit-loving Lars Von Trier – and the resemblance doesn’t stop there.

Koolhoven’s gory, Old Testament-style film has a proto-feminist message about how women have survived oppression throughout history – but takes far too much delight in graphic sexual violence and bodily mutilation for it to really ring true.

One gets the feeling that Koolhoven is raging that Von Trier thought of filming a woman cutting off her own clitoris first – but not to worry, there are plenty more appendages just waiting to be mutilated.

The excessive gendered violence and drudgingly long run-time of Brimstone deflate the power of what could have been an effectively nasty thriller. Dakota Fanning stars as a mute frontier midwife, who is mysteriously terrified by the arrival of a new Reverend (Guy Pearce). She and the Reverend share history, which Koolhoven reveals over three chapters, which unfold in reverse-chronological order. It’s a clever and satisfying device, which captures life in both church communities and brothels with the same cold beauty, while also slowly revealing the characters’ history and depravity.

But god, what relentless depravity. Incest, paedophilia and rape are major themes of the film, all inflicted by men with a sense of legal and religious entitlement. Tongues are cut, intestines gutted, a newborn’s head is crushed – and that’s nothing compared to a scene where a man rapes a prostitute while forcing a little girl to watch.

Fanning and Pearce both put in good performances, Pearce all smouldering sermonising about hellfire and damnation, and Fanning all stoic survival instinct. But survival doesn’t necessarily make Koolhoven’s characters stronger, nor does it bring them joy. Surviving watching the onslaught of Brimstone doesn’t either.

Out now. 3/5