Seraphim Falls (2007)
It's 1863 and the Civil War has ended but for Morsman Carver (Liam Neeson), a Colonel in the Confederate Army, it has brought no ease in either mind or body. His sole mission is to hunt down the prophetically named ex-Union officer Gideon (Pierce Brosnan), now a savvy woodsman with a secret that forever links him to this obsessed predator.
The film opens gruesomely with Gideon shot and carving the bullet from his arm with the machete like knife that is his constant companion. Five men – mercenary bounty hunters - are after him with the seemingly simple order to "let him bleed" and bring him in alive.
However, Gideon is no easy target. His savage and smart survival instincts allow him to turn the tables on his trackers, one-by-one, until he faces the only man – Carver – who is more akin to his heart than he wishes and shares a similar dark code of justice that composes each man's core inner being. They are less two sides of a coin than the same side of the same coin. Their differences are smaller than mere enemies or the Union and Confederate armies they commanded during the war.
Like last year's excellent western, The Proposition, Von Ancken utilizes the landscape as a character and a primary component in stripping the adversaries of their pretenses and from any technological advantage and lays them bare and open to the elements - as well as their own souls. In this regard the film works well – the diametrically opposing climates, the intense cold and parching heat underscore the struggle against a larger palette in which they become merely a small speck in the long line of other fallen, frail beings.
Where the film fails is in its pretentious symbolism and religious allegory and in its displaced sense of time. A seraphim is defined as the first of nine orders of angels from medieval anthropology. Gideon and Carver, as they wind their way through the dense, unknowable forest and sun-cracked desert, meet a parade of real – or imagined – "angels" who gamble and barter with their lives. Among them there's the Minister, Abraham (Tom Noonan), and his flock, who abscond with Carver's ammunition; the Native American who guards the sole watering hole in the arid desolation (Wes Studie) and who levels the odds between Carver and Gideon. There's also the peddler (Anjelica Huston) who, in the final moments appears suddenly, as if a mirage, to offer a single bullet while hucking her snake oil and disappearing into the air.
These "angels" are oblique machinations in a long line of predictable circumstances. We know exactly what will happen and who will be picked off first. There is no particular suspense to the logic and mappings of the plot – or anything new added to the genre. What has placed Gideon in the situation in which we first meet him? In the end, the dark secret revealed, the two soldiers are freed from their feud, and forge the uneasy alliance that unites them in an anti-war sentiment. Like all life-defining hatreds and quests, it – and the film – amounts to nothing. Left with supposition and unanswered questions, even the initial act that started this tempest, resulting in the loss of life and limb, is forgotten in the face of the fact that the answer is still less than it should be.