John Maclean makes westerns about people who have come from somewhere else, and shoots their violence as quick, clumsy and unforgivable, so the laugh and the sickness arrive together. Two features in a decade is thin, but Slow West holds up.
Fi1m perspective
Near the middle of Slow West (2015), a robbery at a trading post goes wrong, a Scottish boy tries to help, and in about three seconds it is over and two children are standing outside in the sun. Maclean holds on the children for exactly as long as it takes the laugh to die. We laughed at how badly everyone had managed it and then we felt ill, and he meant both. That shot is the clearest statement of what he does: violence as something quick, clumsy and unforgivable, staged so that the joke and the cost arrive together and neither cancels the other.
He came to it sideways. Maclean was the keyboardist in The Beta Band and directed their videos, then made shorts, Man on a Motorcycle (2009) and Pitch Black Heist (2011), both with Michael Fassbender, before Slow West gave him a feature. "I wanted to make a film about desperation," he said at the time, and the film bears it out. His Colorado in 1870 is full of people from somewhere else: a Scottish boy who has crossed an ocean for love, a trading post run by a couple who are not American either, three Congolese men singing at a fire. Everyone else has come for money or to get away from something, and the film is clear, without a speech, about which reason the country pays.
The strengths are economy and control. Slow West runs 84 minutes and wastes few of them; it is a western planned shot by shot rather than found on the day, and it looks like it. Robbie Ryan, his cinematographer across three films, gives him fixed, deep frames with an odd, faded colour and a fable's stillness, and Jed Kurzel, who has scored two, keeps the music from telling us how to feel. The weaknesses are in the writing: the middle sags, and the flashbacks to Scotland are thin sketches of a past the present does not need. The finale, in a wheat field, we will not describe, except to say that every shot in it has a consequence and it makes the slower stretch before it look like preparation.
Then nothing for ten years. Tornado (2025) is a revenge story set in Scotland in the 1790s that splices the samurai film onto the western, and the reviews so far are mixed, with several finding that the tones do not sit together. A director who leaves a decade between films ought to make the second one count, and on the evidence of the first, he can. The question is whether that cool, outsider's eye works as well on home ground as it did on someone else's.
Biography
John Maclean is a Scottish film director and screenwriter. He studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Before filmmaking, he was a member of the band the Beta Band, for whom he directed music videos, and later directed videos for other artists including Django Django and KT Tunstall.
Maclean's short films include Man on a Motorcycle (2009) and Pitch Black Heist (2011), the latter winning a BAFTA for Best Short Film. His feature debut Slow West (2015), which he wrote and directed, premiered at Sundance where it won the World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic. He also wrote and directed the feature Tornado (2025). He has collaborated multiple times with actor Michael Fassbender.
