Hostiles Review

Masanobu Takayanagi photographs the journey in cold blues and huge empty distances, and Scott Cooper is patient enough to let the escort take its time, which is the film's real subject: two men who have killed each other's people learning to ride in silence without reaching for a weapon. Bale plays Blocker almost entirely in the jaw and the eyes, a man whose violence has calcified into manners, and the performance is better for how little it explains itself.

Rosamund Pike has the film's strongest single sequence in the opening, and her recovery from it is handled without a single speech about healing. Wes Studi is given far too little to do for a character the whole structure depends on. The middle sags under repetition, with each new threat arriving in the same shape as the last, and the supporting soldiers are types rather than people. The closing scene at a railway platform reaches for a redemption the film has not earned and resolves in a gesture that a story this unsentimental should have refused.