A journey through tension

The American Southwest, winter 1885. Maggie (Cate Blanchett) runs a remote ranch with her two daughters. She is a grim woman and her home is modest: an iron skillet on the stove, a dented teapot, dinner plates dark with tarnish. This is the unbeautiful life she has chosen, but she likes it enough, even loves it sometimes.

One night, her eldest daughter - 16, pretty, difficult - is abducted by a gang led by a cruel Apache mystic, Pesh-Chidin. He wants to sell the girl in Mexico, so heads towards the border casting villainous spells, pursued all the way by a raging Maggie and her eccentric father (Tommy Lee Jones).

The film is the chase, so it's very focused, very fierce; it's instantly stimulating. The Bad lead, the Good follow, and everyone grows thinner, bloodier, dirtier. The photography evokes a clear sense of wilderness America. People ride for days without passing any habitation, or chancing upon anyone at all - just mountains, and gaps in mountains, and rivers.

There is a properly desperate atmosphere of chaos too, everyone roaming and looting, people crying and rumpled - with the exception of Blanchett, who is full of cool dread and awareness, and then occasionally smiles her glittering clown's smile.

Director Ron Howard delivers all the images we expect of a fairly old-fashioned Western (stirrups flapping during a chase, white puffs of smoke from rifles) but goes overboard with Pesh-Chidin.

He is a nightmare creature. Imagine a scarecrow with toasted cashew nuts for teeth and skin like an exploded slaughterhouse and you're nearly there. I'm sure his cheeks are in entirely the wrong place.

This is the usually handsome and tender actor Eric Schweig, and seeing him done up like something conjured to frighten children really bothered me.

Howard tries hard to convey a sense of illusion, shooting Schweig at funny angles, sometimes even from behind rocks and bushes. It's as though the whole crew are hiding there, trembling. In a way this added to the film's accumulating sense of dread, and made it stronger.

The Missing never goes soft and can make you tense without warning. Then it's over and you have barely taken things in. Quite a race.

The Missing
Cert: cert15