The Hateful Eight Review

The Hateful Eight is a deliberate provocation: Quentin Tarantino rented the widest lenses in film history, Ultra Panavision 70, and pointed them at a single room. The joke conceals the method. That enormous frame lets him keep six liars in focus at once, so the poisoning of the coffee plays out in deep background while dialogue distracts the foreground, pure Hitchcock executed in 70mm.

Ennio Morricone's score, all creeping bassoon dread, treats the haberdashery like a monster's stomach. The ensemble is a knife drawer: Samuel L. Jackson's Warren runs the film's cruelest and most commanding monologue, Jennifer Jason Leigh spends the runtime chained, bloodied, and grinning like she has already won, and Walton Goggins quietly performs the only character arc, a racist sheriff argued into something like justice.

The chapter structure and midpoint rewind let Tarantino play narrator and unreliable witness at once. The plot is lurid pulp, a mystery whose solution is simply that everyone was lying, and the violence of the back half tips from tension into splatter, which costs it a step. As craft, conversation, and staging, though, this is a master working without a net.