The Revenant Review

The Revenant is an ordeal by design, and its greatness is almost entirely visual. Emmanuel Lubezki shot in remote wilderness using natural light only, which forced production into brief daily windows and gives every frame a cold, wet authenticity no soundstage can fake; breath fogs the lens, rivers look lethal, and the camera moves through battles in long unbroken takes that put you inside the arrow-fire.

The bear attack remains a landmark of physical filmmaking, staged with a patience that makes it unbearable. Leonardo DiCaprio commits to a nearly wordless performance of crawling, cauterizing, and eating raw bison liver for real, and Tom Hardy's mumbling, self-justifying Fitzgerald is the more interesting acting achievement, a coward who has reasoned himself into innocence.

The limits are structural: strip the images away and the story is a straight line, man crawls toward revenge, stretched across two and a half hours, with dream interludes that gesture at profundity the script never earns and dialogue that mostly grunts exposition. Alejandro G. Iñárritu mistakes suffering for meaning more than once. As pure sensory cinema, though, it is close to unmatched.