Brutal, Violent Art-Revenge Flick Among the Best this Decade.

Rating: 10/10 (9 January 2016)

Wow. What a classic. What an absolute legend of a motion picture. I don't often give out 10/10s, but when I do it tends to be for the sort of brutal, cynical edge-of-your-seat madness that The Revenant thrives on. I really liked Birdman, but Innaritu has done some of his best work here. From the cinematography to the performances to the technical finesse to totally maddening brutality, this is a masterpiece of epic proportions. With regards to immersion, there are sort of two types of films. Some, like the works of Goddard, seem to want to have us think intellectually about the movie, to interact with the movie as a person external to the film interacting with that film. I like these movies, but The Revenant comes from an entirely different world. This is the sort of movie that you get drawn into, where you forget that you are inside a movie theater watching a movie and instead feel the movie at a raw, terrifying, fundamental level. If the frenetic delivery of Birdman was tantamount to jazz, the bare bones brutality of The Revenant is more like industrial metal. I've seen it twice, and intend to go again, and I'd recommend that anyone with eyes and a strong stomach to do the same.