World looks red

The hottest day of the year so far, the auditorium stiflingly hot (hotter than the gradually cooling evening outside), and the sweat virtually dripping off my nose - I can think of no better circumstances in which to have watched 'The Proposition'.

You see, if it hadn't already have been hot, the film would have made me feel hot. It's a very red film, full of the scorched baked-dry Australian outback, sunrises and sunsets, and the characters are constantly glazed in a slick of sweat.

Another reason why you might say, as Sonic Youth did in an early song, that the world looks red is that there's plenty of blood. Lots of it. Loads. Bucketfuls. There's a gruesome seemingly never-ending flogging scene, and another where a chap gets his head blown off.

'The Proposition' is a violent, primal yet occasionally touching and even comical Australian Western - in other words, just what you'd expect given that the screenplay was written by Nick Cave. He and Warren Ellis of The Bad Seeds and Dirty Three provide an original soundtrack, but it was Cave songs like 'Red Right Hand' and the whole of Murder Ballads that continually played in my mind as I watched the stubbled characters with their yellow-teethed grins stare warily and shoot at each other.

Contrasting with the violence there's a real and quite stunning beauty in the barren, desolate vistas of the outback, for which credit must go to director John Hillcoat and director of cinematography Benoit Delhomme.

And yet part of the film's message is that, despite best intentions, that landscape makes everyone savages in the end. Ray Winston's character the British officer Captain Stanley is adamant he will "civilise" the place, and the viewer might have some sympathy for him by the end, but he is at times just as brutal as those on the "wrong" side of the law. At the end of the film he lies badly (perhaps fatally) wounded, the absurdity of his naive colonialist's faith in civilisation underlined by the smashed white picket fence and trampled roses outside his home.

'The Proposition' is stark, bloody, hopeless and unsettling - and worth seeing.