Michael Fassbender’s Slow West (2015) Western revisited, Digi Mart USA News: Many modern Westerns strip away the adventurous romance of the genre, but director John Maclean’s 2015 film Slow West does not. A major hit at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic category before reaching theaters with a simultaneous video-on-demand release.
More than a decade later, Slow West remains one of the best Westerns of this century. The film is currently available on Netflix, although it is leaving soon, and it is also free with ads on YouTube.
Slow West lives up to its title with a leisurely pace, but at a tight 84 minutes it never drags. Set in 19th century Colorado, the story follows a young Scottish man named Jay Cavendish, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, who sets out in search of his supposed one true love, Rose, played by Caren Pistorius, who left Scotland with a price on her head.
Jay meets bounty hunter Silas Selleck, played by Michael Fassbender, by chance, and Silas becomes his guide and guardian. The pair run afoul of Payne, played by Ben Mendelsohn, leader of a gang Silas once belonged to.
Payne is interested in collecting the bounty on Rose.
Smit-McPhee later appeared in the acclaimed 2021 Western The Power of the Dog, which similarly paired him with Benedict Cumberbatch, as Slow West does with him and Fassbender. In The Power of the Dog, Smit-McPhee plays a wolf in sheep’s clothing who weaponizes his unassuming innocence.
In Slow West, that innocence defines Jay Cavendish.
Jay holds naive ideas about adventure and love. Rose never reciprocated his feelings, but he is convinced that the grand gesture of tracking her down will sway her.
Although the frontier forces him to defend himself with a gun, it is clear throughout the film that Jay is not built for the gunslinging life.
Jay’s journey as a Scotsman traveling through America is almost autobiographical for John Maclean, who is from Scotland himself. The parts of the film set in America were filmed in New Zealand, while flashbacks to Scotland were filmed in the real country.
Speaking to the International Business Times in 2015, Maclean said that when he first decided to write a Western, one of the first seeds of the story for him was to depict a frontier filled with European immigrants moving west. Jay and Rose are Scottish, Fassbender uses his Irish accent to play Silas, and Jay and Silas meet a Swedish family during their travels.
Unlike Jay, a newcomer to America, Maclean had seen plenty of the country before making Slow West, which drew him to the Western genre. “After college [a few friends and I] took cars through America delivering them,” he said.
“So, I did a lot of traveling in America. That probably led to me wanting to do a Western.”
Slow West was Maclean’s first feature film. Before that, he had been a musician and part of a group called The Beta Band, where he played keyboards and directed music videos.
According to Maclean, Fassbender agreed to act in his short films because he had been a fan of those Beta Band videos.
“He was shooting [Inglourious Basterds] at the time, so the fact that he even offered his services was a great thing,” Maclean told the BBC. Considering that creative partnership led to Slow West, one of Fassbender’s best movies, the actor’s judgment was sound.
