What I Watched -- The Dark Valley

SLIFF movie #7 was The Dark Valley (trailer), the second movie of my double feature which began with The Major.  T joined me for this one.

The Dark Valley is set high in the mountains.  It's Austrian.  It's heavy.  There's a lot of snow.  (Have I said something similar before?  Perhaps yesterday?)  It's a classic Western-style revenge tale, transplanted into the an isolated, foreign landscape.

A mysterious and not-very-talkative stranger finds his way to the village and secures lodgings for the winter with a young girl and her widowed mother.  The villagers are fascinated by his fancy new daguerreotype, but we come to learn that the real reason for his visit is not to take pictures. It's to wreak vengeance on the band of nasty brothers who run the town with iron fists.

One brother dies, and it's believed to be an accident.  Another brother dies, and the evil patriarch discovers the stranger's treachery.  A manhunt ensues, culminating in the classic shoot-out.  (I could warn about spoilers, but really, if you've ever seen a western, you already know how this goes.)

The scenery is stunning.  The stranger, Greider (played by Sam Riley), is hard to know.  He rarely smiles but is always impeccably dressed.  There is a lot of silence.  The plot is predictable and slow.  But for some reason, the slowness didn't bother me.  It seemed to fit the movie, like that sense of isolation that accompanies a winter storm.  Not to mention that I love a good shoot-out and the film is pretty to look at in the meantime.

Bottom line: probably the best vigilante justice flick I've seen a few years, but you have to be patient, and you have to like that sort of thing or the blood and gore will put you off.  Even I cringed a few times.