Anna Daniels
The locations favor landscapes of brown grass and leafless trees that reach up toward overhanging clouds. The camera often tracks tiny figures on horseback laterally or from high overhead as they race through these blasted or starved-out landscapes, which evoke panoramas from a World War I or post-apocalypse picture. As the story unfolds, it starts to sink in that both the landscape and characters are supposed to be figurative or emblematic rather than “realistic”—the stuff of dreams. The images become flamboyant, even theatrical. The winner of a bare-knuckle brawl preens like a cartoon gorilla, loping on all fours and rising up to pound his sweaty chest. Ned’s mother stares at a grove of denuded trees at night and sees her husband and son writhing in existential torment, shirtless and lit by an immense strobe light.
There are almost no “normal” relationships to be seen. Whether the film is detailing connections between family members, friends, or different representatives of a society or government, there’s always a twisted, broken, or disconnected aspect. The police sworn to protect citizens exploit them financially and/or sexually (starting with Charlie Hunnam’s Sergeant O’Neill, a sexual predator who can’t seem to stay away from the Kelly women). Mothers and fathers alternately protect and exploit their own children (Ned’s own mother sells him off at one point) and men and women in romantic relationships verbally and physically abuse each other without subsequent comment, as if such behavior is to be expected when you get together with somebody. Men, women, and children are constantly threatened, tormented, sometimes killed without warning. Men are beaten until their faces cave in. Men’s genitals are brutalized as punishment for transgression. Women get punched in the face whenever the man they’re arguing with feels like he’s losing. Everyone accepts that their lineage might not be whatever they were told it was. You can’t depend on anything: the law, the family, truth, justice. To paraphrase the title of a Werner Herzog classic, its every person for themselves and God against all. It’s a cruel, cold world—so unrelenting that it’s a miracle that someone like Ned, who has endured a lifetime of suffering, could bring himself to be nice to anybody, even for a moment.
The filmmakers conceive nearly every significant moment as a face-off between strong-willed people (usually two men, but sometimes a man and a woman) that escalates to verbal or physical violence, except when it escalates to physical intimacy: not just intercourse, oral sex, or post-coital conversations (the story begins with a child secretly watching a sex act, and there are many sequences set in brothels where women service men) or a long, chaste embrace with tons of eye contact (between men and women, but also between men and men).
— 2019 Hollywood Movie Review
