Review: The Revenant is a big-screen epic for the ages

The Revenant is a devastating, visually jawdropping film that, for all its sins of tedium, makes up with scale what it lacks in artfulness, feels Raja Sen.

Blood stands for beauty in The Revenant. 

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s brave -- and bravura -- new film is a frostbitten epic.

It is a film that mesmerises with its brutality and its breadth, its ragged relentlessness and its barely masked masochism, and, perhaps above all, a film that must be experienced in a theatre -- ideally with a sweater at hand. 

So brilliantly do Iñárritu and his master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki evoke the sense of freezing cold that it’s hard not to shiver, and the colour white, in all its pristine glory, emerges the most forbidding, most biting of the lot: the picture-perfect frames are composed around temperature rather than merely colour, with the white of the snow and the white of rapids more frightening and endless than any angry animal.

Icicles crust around big beards making whiskers look like they could be snapped off like twigs, steam from mouths fogs up even the lens of the majestic camera, and, once in a too-blue moon, we find respite in the form of a warmer temperature: in firelight and in blood. 

Blood, in all its forms.

Blood as it runs down a broken nose or a recently-stabbed leg, blood as it drips out from a furry carcass or from a still-throbbing liver, blood as it colours and cakes the snow to break a parent’s heart, blood as it fills vengeful eyes. Iñárritu is clearly consumed by a self-imposed quest for blood and beauty, but -- the question must be asked -- how much must beauty bleed? 

Also, how deep is the wound, truly?

Iñárritu ramps up the suffering more and more, loading up the misfortune to the point where one begins to brace oneself for what fresh, frigid hell he will conjure up next for his protagonist Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

DiCaprio doesn’t come close to hitting a false note but Iñárritu, tragically, does: as an edge-of-the-seat revenge drama, the film is right up there, but the filmmaker overreaches for grander themes, making do with some hokum expressed by philosophically shallow visions and obvious spirituality.

There is even some heavy-handed exoticising of Native Americans. Even these significant missteps, however, look sensational. 

There might not be much profoundness in the imagery, but, my God, what images The Revenant holds.

From a haunting close-up of a horse’s eye to the thrilling, surreal vision of a spotted horse being ridden across dalmatian terrain, this film is a spectacular showcase for Lubezki, and the ace -- on a hot streak after Gravity and Birdman -- flexes his muscles so hard that the film belongs to him.

There are moments his mighty Steadicam swivels around in a giddy sweep, like an eager child trying to drink it all in, trying to contain the spellbinding beauty of the impossible settings without blinking -- a smashing early shot follows attackers and fleers during an ambush in stunningly visceral style, riding with them and falling with them -- and others where his camera seems to gazes at the proceedings helplessly -- like when a bear takes charge.