Meek’s Cutoff review – gaunt, mysterious, and appearing to come from another age

Kelly Reichardt's gaunt, mysterious and superbly calibrated movie about pioneers and the old American west appears to have come from another age – from the early days of Malick or Antonioni. When I saw it again in London last week, the print itself was worn, speckling the images with lines and scratches, and reinforcing the weird sense that we were watching   a rediscovered classic.

Reichardt's film-making palette is determined by the parched, scorched landscape and the grim faces of those travelling across it. It is a world of tough browns and ochres, pale greys; the blue of the sky is bleached out with glare and haze. And with its long, silent takes (music is used sparingly on the soundtrack), it is a film which compels you to examine the details. For the first 10 minutes, it is entirely wordless, and long stretches will go by in which you can hear only the repeated whine of the wagon wheels as the pioneers grimly trudge along, rather like the squeaky wind-wheel in the famous opening of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Sometimes, this sound is only just audible above the roar of the wind across the plains.

We join the story as three 19th-century pioneer families are struggling along the desolate Oregon trail; they have evidently been persuaded to break away from the main column on the promise of a short cut. Now they are hopelessly lost. They travel mostly on foot, leading their horses to save energy and water, their wagons, containing precious barrels of water, pulled by oxen.

As reserves of water run low, Reichardt shows the pilgrims gazing into the barrels, and implying their despair as they can easily make out the whorls and knots of wood at the bottom. Their leaders are Soloman and Emily Tetherow, played by Will Patton and Michelle Williams; they are the most mature and commonsensical of the party, and the ones who feel most grimly the calamity of having struck out on their own. Their taciturn friends William and Glory White are played by Neal Huff and Shirley Henderson, and Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan play Thomas and Millie Gately, a couple with a tendency to foolishness and panic, too easily spooked by problems, too easily excited by promises of rich farmland or gold prospecting.

But the most extraordinary of the party is Stephen Meek, tremendously played by Bruce Greenwood: a man with the clothes and manner of a huckster or fairground barker. He looks as if he should be the star of some itinerant Wild West show, like Frank James or "Wild" Bill Hickok. Hehas been employed as their guide. He has persuaded these poor souls to follow him, and his gift of the gab simply never lets up: always joking, wisecracking, pontificating, speculating. His sheer torrent of words is almost bizarrely at odds with the utter silence of the landscape and the film itself. Even when it is entirely plain that they are lost, the water is running out and that he has led them astray, Meek never admits defeat. His optimism is enigmatic. Is he keeping up a brave front? Or is it a kind of pathology, an inability to see the truth? The kind of pathology, in fact, that all pioneers need?

The pioneers' restlessness and panic is compounded when they capture a Native American of the Cayuse tribe (Ron Rondeaux) and decide to keep him as prisoner so that he can be their guide. Meek urges the group to hang this dangerous savage before he slaughters them, perhaps trying to find a diversionary focus for their growing, murderous rage, and all too well aware that his employers are deciding whether or not to hang the slippery Meek himself, suspecting some kind of treachery. And so the group forges onward, the balance of power shifting subtly and inexorably to the Cayuse, as they trudge into an existential unknown.

Quietly and firmly, Williams exerts her own authority as a performer over this film: her character is the one who sees their predicament most clearly, together with Meek's role in it and their own consequent culpability for allowing themselves to be bamboozled. Perhaps the most powerful moment in the film is when she comes face to face with the Cayuse out in the scrub while the menfolk are away. After he retreats behind the horizon, she scurries back to the wagon, and trembling with fear and determination, loads and fires their rifle into their air: the pre-arranged alarm signal. It is a moment of non-violent violence, a premonition of confrontation and fear.

This man's presence is blazingly vivid in its alienness, almost extra-terrestrial, and the movie itself shimmers on the brink of some kind of mass hallucination. The pioneers are horrified at this Native American, and by their own inability to understand anything about him; they are convulsed at Meek's dark warnings of the native's legendary scalpings and savagery. His callous, swaggeringly explicit descriptions of this are reminiscent, but in contrast to, John Wayne's reticent horror and fury at the same practices in a very different film, John Ford's The Searchers ("What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture?")

There is a comparable sense of an embattled, frightened expeditionary force, out of food and water, and ideas: without the experience, resources or language to understand someone who may be their destroyer or their only hope of survival. This superbly made, austere film is Reichardt's best yet, certainly a huge advance on her previous work, Wendy and Lucy (2008) and a powerful new addition to the western genre.