An Jo on the Revenant

This piece originally appeared on BOLLYBRIT

The Revenant (meaning someone who returns from the dead), as it turns out in the hands of Alejandro G. Iñárritu, comes across more as the success and a symbol of cinematic magnetism than a tale of human ‘spirit’ as many clichéd descriptions would have you believe. Every frame, every shot is bathed with the beauty that cinema can achieve and through that, the ugliness that can be refracted. The juxtaposition of ethereal snow-filled caps and pleasantly flowing brooks with the sight of a man wallowing in pus-infected animal-wounds or eating a dead animal’s liver – puking, but still eating— under-scoring Darwin’s ‘Survival of the Fittest’ theory as a ‘lived’ experience — is something for the visual senses only cinema can provide. In reality, this experience is difficult to experience whether one is either a subject or an object of that experience. But cinema provides a vantage point to visualize and sink into and Iñárritu leaves no snow-ball unturned in this tale of a man’s survival story only to extract vengeance on a man that betrayed and left him and his son for dead in the wintry-wild of South Dakota.

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