Surrounded

 Surrounded is a movie of striking contrasts, of starkly backlit figures against beautiful backdrops. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the film's stunning opening sequence, a gorgeous tracking shot following Mo Washington (Letitia Wright) from church to saloon; She starts her walk on the pre-dawn gloom, and ends it bathed in sunlight streaking through the dust kicked up by the activity of a tiny frontier settlement gearing up for the day. Teal to orange - an object lesson in complementary colours, immaculately realised.

I took so many screen captures during this one...

 The scene pointedly features natives being brutally manhandled and pushed into cages. The film is set in 1870, just five years after the civil war, and Mo is a black woman passing for a man to avoid attention - so you can imagine what goes through her head. She's there to get a stagecoach to Colorado, where a stretch of land awaits her.

 But if westerns have taught us anything, it's that travelling coach is a terrible idea. A botched robbery leaves the travellers stranded in a picturesque stretch of dusty wilderness sans coach. Most of the group leave to go get help, leaving Mo behind to keep watch over a chained captive - Tommy Walsh (Jamie Bell; Billy Elliot, all grown up!), a notorious outlaw with a sizeable bounty on his head.

 Toby is a brash, motormouthed fella who alternates between pushing Mo's buttons and trying to escape. An uneasy rapport develops between them as they wait to see who gets to them first - the stagecoach survivors with help, or Walsh's partners in crime.

 There are some complications, of course - the film's best moment involves the great, late Michael K. Williams in a late, mostly stand-alone development - but the meat of the movie is the duel of wills between Mo and her prisoner. The dialogue gets very theatrical at times, with long, blunt, somewhat stilted conversations and monologues in between the shootouts.

 That's where the script, by Justin Thomas and Andrew Pagana, stumbles the most. Some conversations are fine, if a bit stage-bound, but many feel a bit off, a bit forced, and every so often, more than a little preachy. None of this is helped by a lack of clarity as to what the movie is getting at with the central relationship. That is, if it's got anything to say beyond 'people react to things differently' - maybe not, maybe it's just a plot device; If so, it could do with losing a lot of the posturing.

 Both principals do a good job. Wright shows a lot of pain and vulnerability lurking just under her steely gunslinger veneer - one moment in particular, in which she's at her wits' end and admits as much, hits hard. On the whole, though her character seems slightly underwritten. Bell does not have that problem; The advantage of playing an extrovert who sometimes seems incapable of shutting up, I guess.

 Still, Surrounded works well as a genre piece - the action is well staged and exciting, Mo's situation makes for a few good tense moments, and visually, it is sumptuous (cinematographer: Max Goldman). There are more iconic shots of cowboys posing silhouetted in shadows against some beautiful stretch of land than you can shake a six shooter at - and... sure enough, director Anthony Mandler has mostly worked in music videos. The old Russel Mulcahy precedent holds true. All this cool western iconography gets a little cheesy, but honestly it looks good enough that it's easily forgivable.