Brimstone (2016)
In the menacing inferno of the old North-American West, Liz is a genuine survivor who is hunted by a vengeful preacher for a crime she didn’t commit.
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3 films that influenced Brimstone
What critics say influenced Brimstone
It’s always good to see homage paid to “The Night of the Hunter,” one of the greatest of all American films, and Dutch writer-director Martin Koolhoven’s doom-laden Western does so in spades; some of the compositions and lines of dialogue (and not merely the scriptural ones), especially in the final reel, are obvious reminiscences.
With Pearce’s Dutch preacher, lanky form and Amish beard, he resembles a cross between a demonic Abraham Lincoln and Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter.
Certain strains of Good Book piousness are just an excuse for very bad behavior — ask Robert Mitchum’s itinerant man of God in “The Night of the Hunter,” an obvious antecedent.
In many ways the western form, though indelibly associated with the saddle-weary low-slung machismo of the John Wayne/John Ford collaborations, has always lent itself to strong female roles, whether it’s Joan Crawford in Nicholas Ray‘s “Johnny Guitar,” Barbara Stanwyck in Anthony Mann‘s “The Furies” (which actually is a masterpiece) or Anne Bancroft in Ford’s own swan song “7 Women.”
…“woman is put through hell”—Brimstone is in the lineage of Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark or Dogville.
When the credits eventually rolled, I’d concluded that Koolhoven is a wannabe Lars von Triers, with the film occupying the same aggressively audience-unfriendly territory as something like Breaking the Waves or Dogville, but with only a fraction of the complexity and none of the pitch black humor.