Parky at the Pictures (DVD 25/1/2018)

Following a heavy night of drink and drugs, Tel Aviv flatmates Mouna Hawa and Sana Jammelieh are taken aback by the arrival of Shaden Kanboura, a jilbab-wearing computer student who is a cousin of their friend Samar Qupty and who needs some peace and quiet to study for her finals. She is from the city of Umm Al-Fahem, while Hawa is a secular lawyer from Nazareth and Jammelieh is an aspiring DJ from a Christian family in Tarshisa.

Unbeknown to her parents, Jammelieh is a lesbian and has no intention of marrying boorish men like chicken farmer Ali Assadi, with whom mother Khawlah Hag-Debsy and aunt Afaf Danien keep trying to matchmake her. With her shock of corkscrew hair and a cigarette always on the go, Hawa is quite prepared to speak her mind and makes little attempt to disguise her amusement when Kanboura bundles excessive amounts of luggage into the car when the trio attend a wedding. She flirts with one of the male guests in the same way she teases a Jewish lawyer who has a crush on her. But she remains in control and enjoys watching macho men dancing attendance on her.

Kanboura gets a visit from her fiancé, Henry Andrawes, who dislikes the fact she has moved to the centre of Tel Aviv and tries to persuade her to stay with a member of his family in Jaffa. She refuses politely and is put out when he snaps that he would rather she stayed at home and raised his children than working at the local school. He refuses to shake Jammelieh's hand when they are introduced and sniffs his disapproval when some of her friends arrive with beer bottles clinking in a carrier bag. Having had a tough day after quitting her restaurant job because the boss refuses to let her speak Arabic in the kitchen, Jammelieh just wants to chill with some friends. But Hawa takes a shine to film-maker Mahmoud Shalaby and, having smoked a joint on the balcony, they tumble into bed, with the intrigued Kanboura listening at the door.

When Hawa returns from a walk by the sea, she finds Kanboura dancing to pop music with her hair down. They bop together and chat about their men. Kanboura admits to not loving Andrawes, but hopes that they get along well enough to make the marriage work. She helps Hawa cook dinner for Shalaby and makes herself scarce when Andrawes orders her to inspect a bedsit he has found for her in Jaffa, even though it's a long way from the university campus. On his next visit, he berates her for burning the food and for disobeying him. He accuses her of having been corrupted by her flatmates and, when she refuses to leave because she likes living with Hawa and Jammelieh, he rapes her and leaves her sobbing on the bed.

Meanwhile, Jammelieh has found a job in a bar and has landed a DJing gig. She has also met doctor Ahlam Canaan and is hoping to spend the night with her when Hawa gets so drunk that she has to see her home. They arrive to find Kanboura slumped on the bathroom floor and help her shower and regain her composure before plotting their revenge on Andrawes. He works for a charitable organisation and Hawa phones for an appointment and cover her hair so he won't recognise her. She spins him a sob story about being beaten and he can't resist touching her shoulder when she exposes it to show him the bruises. But, when Hawa calls on Shalaby to go for dinner, he is frosty towards her because his sister, Nahed Hamed, from the village of Taybeh has come for advice because her son has been arrested for possessing drugs. Hawa reassures her that he will probably be treated leniently for a first offence, but Shalaby is furious with her for smoking in front of Hamed and, when he suggests that she starts behaving like a Muslim woman, she threatens to end their relationship.

Jammelieh takes Canaan to meet her family in Tarshiha and she is embarrassed to discover that her mother has set up a supper meeting with another suitor. Gawky mechanical engineer Sobhi Hosari arrives with his mother, Yasmin Makhloof, whose ample bosom fascinates Jammelieh's teenage brother, Amir Khoury. She is embarrassed by the fawning chit-chat and the excruciating song of welcome and takes the first opportunity to flee to the kitchen and make coffee. However, when Canaan gives her a consolatory kiss, Hag-Debsy sees them through the door and hurries away in distress.

Dinner at the home of Kanboura's parents is no less strained, as she refuses to make eye contact with Andrawes, let alone speak to him. He asks her father, Eyad Sheety, if it would be possible to bring the wedding forward and boasts that he is making good progress with the house he is building. But, when he raises the subject in the car back to Tel Aviv, Kanboura informs him that she doesn't love him. At the same time, Hag-Debsy tells husband Suhel Hadad what she has seen and they order Canaan out of the house and he slaps his daughter across the face before declaring that she will stay in the house until he finds a husband for her.

Over-hearing her father hissing that rumours of a lesbian scandal will ruin his chances of being elected to the local council, Jammelieh sneaks away and takes a taxi to the city. She tells Canaan that she plans on moving to Berlin, as she can no longer stand the petty restrictions that make her life intolerable. However, she joins Kanboura in ambushing Andrawes when he meets with Hawa in an underground car park and they show him photographs of him touching up Hawa during their appointment at the charity. He tries to persuade Kanboura to have nothing to do with the whores who have turned her against him. But she remains resolute and when Andrawes starts to tell Sheety that he is renouncing Kanboura because she has changed, he refuses to hear a bad word against his daughter and sends Andrawes packing before embracing his crying child.

Hawa keeps it equally short and to the point when she bumps into Shalaby while out with Firas Nassar, the gay friend who had introduced them. Shalaby waits for Hawa by her car and slides into the passenger seat and asks why she is being so off with him. When she asks if he would ever let him meet his parents, he looks away and she accuses him of using her for sex when he is wholly unworthy of her. She orders him out of the car and drives home for the goodbye party she and Kanboura are throwing for Jammelieh. Hawa puts on bright red lipstick and snorts some coke, while Kanboura drifts on to the dance floor to have fun. However, she sees Hawa being pestered by one of the guests and follows her to the balcony, where the three friends sit in silence and wonder when things will ever change.

While there's no question that the issues raised in this engaging debut need addressing, this isn't always the most nuanced of films. The generational aspects seem particularly clichéd, while the menfolk are almost uniformly boorish or nebbish caricatures. Moreover, much of the action teeters on melodrama, with the feisty Hawa and Jammelieh falling head over heels with surprising speed, while Kanboura's dilemma makes little sense as it's readily evident from the denouement that her father would have supported any decision to split with the hypocritical Andrawes.

Nevertheless, Hamoud deftly interweaves the storylines while ensuring that each receives equal(ish) screen time. Hawa starts out as the most intriguing of the trio, with her wild ways contrasting tellingly with the shrewd way she negotiates a plea bargain with a Jewish lawyer. But her romance with Shalaby hits the skids too quickly, even though Hamoud points out that a cosmopolitan who has trained to make films in New York can be as much a chauvinist as the next man. Hawa's entrapment interlude also feels somewhat specious, as it's unlikely that a lawyer would take such a sizeable professional and personal risk. More credible is the casual racism that Jammelieh endures, which reminds viewers of the extra burdens placed on Arab women in Israel. But, while her matchmaking trysts are amusing, the romance with Canaan rarely convinces and her decision to decamp to Berlin (when she has never mentioned leaving Israel before) feels unduly contrived.

The Kanboura strand contains echoes of Hamoud's short, Salma, in which the equally voluptuous Jasmin Abu Al-Naaj develops a telephone crush on the freedom fighter whose life she had saved, only for him to ditch her when they finally meet and she fails to live up to his fantasy. But, while Kanboura is as solid as Hawa and Jammelieh, Andrawes is a fotofit villain and much of the other support playing feels stiff. Fortunately, Itay Gross's photography is more agile, while production designer Hagar Brutman draws neat contrasts between the urban and village domiciles. Li Alembik's costumes are also effective, as is MG Saad's style-flitting score. Furthermore, it's good to see producer Shlomi Elkabetz continuing to challenge the perception of women in Israeli society, as he had done with his late sister Ronit in the powerful courtroom saga, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014).

Frustratingly few Swiss features reach the UK. So, we should be grateful that Rolando Colla's breezy, but slight romcom, 7 Days, follows Claude Barras's charming animation, My Life As a Courgette, on to disc. Making his fifth feature, the Italian-speaking Colla received UK festival play for his Tuscan coming-of-age saga, Summer Games (2011), which launched his partnership with cinematographer Lorenz Merz, who returns in tandem with Gabriel Lobos to make the most of the stunning Sicilian island scenery. But, as in that genial kidpic, Colla here proves better at storytelling than character analysis, with the consequence that this adult rite of passage glistens on the surface while offering insufficient depth.

Recovering addicts-cum-alcoholics Marc Barbé and Linda Olsansky have decided to get married on a small Sicilian island with a population of just 26 people. They have asked his botanist brother, Bruno Todeschini, and her costume-designing best friend, Alessia Barela, to make the arrangements. But it soon becomes clear that the lighthouse where Barbé wants to spend his last night as a bachelor is uninhabitable, while the hotel where they plan to hold the reception is a dump.

Determined to give Olsansky her special day, Barela scolds Todeschini for being so negative and for making his dismay so plain to the locals, even after they give them a rendition of the folk song they plan to sing at the reception. Over supper, she asks why he is so hostile to Barbé and he complains that he refuses to face facts. But Barela shames him by revealing that he wants to stay in a lighthouse because he vowed to kick heroin in one and regards it as a symbol of bright beginnings. They patch things up during a late-night swim in the pool, however, and fall asleep with a sense that their mission might not be so impossible after all.

The following morning, Todeschini fills a bucket in the crystal clear bay and finds some rare flowers en route to the lighthouse. While he makes a start on tidying up, Barela gets to know the elderly hotel manager, Aurora Quattrocchi, and her sons Fabrizio Pizzuto and Gianluca Spaziani, who has Down Syndrome. After lunch, she cycles across the island and joins Todeschini on the lamp balcony, where he proceeds to kiss her and declare that he is getting to like her. They stop to kiss again after riding past a flock of sheep on a bumpy, dusty road. The wind whistles through the thistles and tufted grass, as well as through Todeschini's thinning hair, as their lips touch. But she turns down his invitation to eat in his room and cycles off alone, leaving Todeschini to play pinball after having a tetchy conversation with agent Vincent Held over an article he is writing.

As the third day dawns, Barela and Todeschini go shopping and cause an argument between shopkeeper Benedetto Raneli and wife Carmela Conti over who keeps the money. They take a boat trip around the island and dive to see some ancient artifacts buried in the sea bed. As they lie on the beach, Todeschini and Barela kiss again and he suggests that they have a three-day affair and then break it off when the wedding guests arrive and never see each other again. Concerned because she has a long-term partner and a teenage daughter, Barela agrees when Todeschini declares that time kills love and that they will be able to enjoy full-flight passion without any of the comedown.

They hurry back to the hotel to find Quattrocchi presiding over a friend sheep's blood party for her neighbours. As they eat, she asks Todeschini whether he's married and she reveals that she had the last laugh on her unfaithful husband, as she got to bury him while still his wife. Eager to be alone, Barela and Todeschini make their excuses, but they have barely undressed before the maid comes to clean the room and he skulks away to work on his article. He goes for a walk and returns to find Barela missing from her room and is delighted to discover her asleep in his bed. He wakes her and they make love.

Canoodling in the shower the following morning, the lovers chase each other to the bed and fall about in hysterical laughter. However, Todeschini is stung when Barbé and Olsansky mention Gianfelice Imparato and Fiorella Campanella during a Skype chat and Barela and he demands to know whether Barela is still in love or is too scared to end a relationship that is cosy rather than exciting. She insists things are fine and that Todeschini has no right to be jealous because he was the one who wanted a quick fling. He asks her to phone Imparato so he can hear how she talks to him. But he calls back while they are carrying the mattress they have been to fetch from a neighbouring island and she snaps at him when he suggests coming a day early. Todeschini dares Barela to admit that she wants to break up with Imparato, but she bites back that he is incapable of love and he tosses the bed frame off the cliff in frustration.

Barela ignores Todeschini as he calls to her from the boat, as she strides back to the hotel. As he reaches the bay, however, he sees a funeral procession and Raneli beckons him to follow. He asks after Barela and suggests that he chews slowly on two sage leaves to quell his anger. The old man asks Todeschini for one of his cigarettes, only to have a wheezing fit and Todeschini watches with a mixture of regret and envy as Conti holds his hand while he straps on an oxygen mask. He Skypes old flame Christine Citti and asks why he is incapable of sustaining relationships and she informs him that he is weak, while being surprised by how emotional he seems. Coming down to the dining-room, he sits away from Barela and asks Quattrocchi for two sage leaves. He notices a young girl at another table watching him and he jumps up to talk to Barela as she finishes her meal. But she is furious with him for wanting her to destroy a 15-year partnership for three days of no-strings sex.

However, when Todeschini corners Barela on the ferry to Trapani the next day, she allows him to accompany her while she finds musicians and a shop that sells sugared almonds. They dance to an accordion and kiss passionately in a stairwell and Todeschini admits that he needs her and can't stand the thought of returning to his old life. Tumbling into bed in the nearest hotel, they spend the afternoon getting to know each other and she teases him about knowing when love dies and not having a clue about keeping it alive. Yet, during the voyage back to the island, Barela drops the bombshell that she can't leave Imparato, as he helped her win back custody of her two year-old daughter after she had been dealing drugs and owes him too much to walk away on a whim. So, Todeschini opts out of their last night together and goes to the lighthouse to repair the beacon.

The following morning, he helps the locals empty the schoolroom that is no longer needed now that all the children have left. He showers and joins Barela on the jetty to greet the bride and groom and their guests. Imparato introduces himself and Todeschini hugs parents Armen Godel and Laurence Montandon. Barbé wants to show Olsansky the lighthouse and they drive across the island, while Barela goes to her room with Imparato. Barbé is delighted with the canopy that Todeschnini has made for his bed and informs his brother than Olsansky is pregnant. Back at the hotel, Olsansky asks Barela what has been going on with Todeschini and refuses to believe her when she denies all.

As the village choir sings, the wedding party is rowed out into the bay in a flotilla of little boats. Todeschini films with his camera, as Barbé and Oslansky beam with happiness. He also applauds when Imparato recites a poem by Pablo Neruda, but Campanella insists on taking his picture when they return to the long table laid out on the waterfront. Godel asks Todeschini why he never found a girl to marry and Imparato notices Barela shoot fleeting glances at a man clearly holding back the pain. The musicians play and the string of lights hanging over the jetty begin to twinkly in the dusk, as Oslansky thanks everyone for making their day perfect.

When darkness falls, Todeschini projects a short film tribute to the newlyweds on to the whitewashed wall of a fisherman's cottage and the guests bop along to `Human Fly'' by The Cramps. A wedding cake with sparklers at the corners of the platter is carried in and the higgledy-piggledy buildings look sublime from offshore, as everyone dances and celebrates love and life. But Todeschini has made up his mind to leave the island with the magicians at the end of the party and Barela barely lets a flicker of emotion escape as she turns on her heel and walks away.

After Barbé and Oslansky leave for the lighthouse, Barela helps Quattrocchi clear away. Imparato wants to go to bed, but Barela insists on a moment with Todeschini. He asks her to walk him to the boat, but she tells him to leave and not look back if he loves her. As the last day breaks, he wanders through the village and steps on to the gangplank. Without turning his head, he ducks into the cabin and waits for the engine to start. After a while, he ventures on to the deck and is relieved to see Barela sitting on the opposite side, as the screen cuts to black.

Few will be surprised by the ending, but not many will be entirely convinced by it, as Colla and co-scenarists Olivier Lorelle, Nicole Borgeat and Héloïse Adam never persuade us that Barela is unhappy enough with Imparato to take a risk on a self-centred stranger like Todeschini. It's not as if he bowls her over with charm, as he makes his proposal with indecent haste and then sulks like a child whenever he doesn't get his own way. He also offers Barela a distinctly sketchy future, as even though he is based at the University of Grenoble, he is clearly no bargain in the stability stakes. But, with the majority of movies being about happy endings rather than happy ever afters, Colla is able to send the audience home with a soppy sense of well-being.

If the storyline and characterisation are superficial and the dialogue a touch trite, the visuals are a delight, with Merz and Lobos making evocative use of the rugged Levanzo scrubland and its glorious port. They even throw in some shimmering underwater sequences and a number of poignant close-ups of touching hands. Production designer Marcello di Carlo adds to the fairytale feel with the transformation of the lighthouse and the lighting of the reception after the floating nuptials. Bernd Schurer's music further enhances the aura of authenticity. But the recitation of Neruda's `Where Can Guillermina Be?' feels like a calculating allusion to Michael Radford's Il Postino (1994), especially as Todeschini and Barela get nowhere near the romantic nuance that Massimo Troisi and Maria Grazia Cucinotta achieved on the Sicilian islands of Pollara and Procida.

Although he had built up a solid reputation at home with features like AmnesiA (2001). Schnitzel Paradise, Bonkers (both 2005) and Happy Family (2006), Dutch director Martin Koolhoven first came to the attention of British viewers with his Second World War drama, Winter in Wartime (2008). However, while he will make a much greater impression with his first English-language outing, Brimstone reveals a tendency towards grandiloquence and grandstanding that suggests Koolhoven needs a no-nonsense producer capable of channelling his evident talent and curtailing a self-indulgent streak that, at times, comes close to rendering this brooding and boorishly bombastic Western unwatchable.

In an opening chapter entitled `Revelation', mute midwife Liz (Dakota Fanning) delivers a child with the help of her young daughter, Sam (Ivy George), who can interpret her sign language. She is married to homesteader Eli (William Houston), who has an adolescent son, Matthew (Jack Hollington), by a former marriage. They lead a quiet existence in a small frontier settlement. But Liz is chilled to the marrow when she hears the Dutch-accented voice of The Reverend (Guy Pearce), the new preacher who delivers a sermon about the fires of Hell and the imminence of retribution. He glowers at her from the pulpit when Abigail (Charlotte Croft), the wife of their neighbour Nathan (Bill Tangradi), goes into labour after the service and Liz fears for the future when she fails to prevent the baby from dying at birth.

Liz blames The Reverend for the death and she senses his presence in the long grass beside her home. Yet, when a drunken Nathan sets fire to their buggy and fires bullets through the window late at night, it's The Reverend who calms him down and Eli offers him a whisky in gratitude. Liz hides in the shadows, but The Reverend (who has an angry scar across his left eye) informs her that she had no right to make the choice over who lived or died and that she can expect his punishment. She urges Eli to pack up and leave, but he thinks she is afraid of the grief-stricken Nathan rather than the sinister man of God, who taunts her for having lost her tongue in threatening the safety of her family.

The next morning, Matthew finds his sheep slaughtered in the barn (with one having its unborn lambs ripped from its womb) and Eli ride with his son to demand an explanation, only to discover that Nathan and Abigail have moved out. While they are away, Liz blindfolds Sam so she doesn't see the carcasses and has her sing `Abide With Me' while she works. However, The Reverend locks her in the barn and leads Sam away and Liz knocks herself out trying to smash an upper window to rescue her child. When Eli returns, he finds Sam unharmed and is bemused why his wife has taken such a dislike to the new preacher.

That night, he learns why, as Liz rides to the church after Sam reveals that The Reverend had accused her of murdering a man. She creeps up to his bed with a knife in her hand and pulls back the bedclothes to find Sam's doll on the mattress. A rapid cut shows The Reverend clutching a bigger blade, as he looks into Sam's bedroom. However, his target is Eli and he disembowels him for earning Liz's love before torching the house. Matthew and Sam escape and the former is forced to put his father out of his misery when he finds him in the stable with his intestines wrapped around his neck. Liz bundles the children into a buggy to stay with her father-in-law (Adrian Sparks) in the hills. But, as The Reverend picks Sam's doll out of the dust in front of the blazing building, it's clear that he will pursue her wherever she goes.

The story flashes back in the second chapter, `Exodus', to show a young girl named Joanna (Emilia Jones) wandering in the wilderness. She is rescued by a Chinese family and sold to Frank (Paul Anderson), who runs the Frank's Inferno bordello in the mining town of Bismuth. He entrusts her to Sally (Vera Vitali), who gives her a glass of lemonade and protects her from the other girls and the less scrupulous customers. However, Fred (Fergus O'Donnell) is not one to take no for an answer and he forces Joanna to watch as he copulates with Sally. When he begins striking her, Joanna pulls a gun and this increases Fred's excitement. But, when he orders Joanna to clean him up, Sally shoots him in the back and is hanged in the square by Frank's brother Zeke (Frederick Schmidt) for getting ideas above her station in thinking she can deprive a hard-working man of his pleasure.

Joanna takes the loss of her friend badly and Frank explains that girls have to obey the rules of face the consequences. She says she knows all about paying a heavy price and makes no resistance as he forces himself on her. As time passes, Joanna (now played by Dakota Fanning) becomes a prostitute and watches with best friend Elizabeth (Carla Juri) as Frank guns down an old man (Peter Blankenstein) whose daughter had perished at the saloon. However, as she looks across the street, Joanna sees Zeke pulling back a rifle from an upstairs room to protect his younger brother.

She gets a further idea of how Frank views the law when Elizabeth bites a client's tongue when he tries to kiss her and he demands that her own tongue is cut off in retribution. The drunken gold miners howl in assent and Joanna hides behind the door in wide-eyed terror. She learns the sign language that Elizabeth picks up from a book the doctor (Justin Salinger) gave her and tries to dissuade her from killing Frank in revenge. Joanna is relieved, therefore, when a matchmaker finds Elizabeth a husband who doesn't mind her being mute and they agree to pose as sisters so that Joanna can escape the Inferno.

But, on the night Elizabeth is packing to leave, The Reverend shows up and pays to have the saloon to himself. Frank has the girls parade down the stairs, but the stranger makes his choice when he finds the two moles on Joanna's neck and recognises her even though she is wearing a mask. He claims she is the only person who can deliver him from hellfire and demands that she leaves with him. But she cowers in a corner and watches as Elizabeth slashes The Reverend across the face with her knife. However, he stabs her and turns to confront Joanna. She seizes Elizabeth's blade and slashes his throat and he falls to the floor.

Stealing a pouch from his pocket, Joanna takes Elizabeth's papers and causes a fire by throwing a torch on her friend's face so that no one can recognise her. Under cover of darkness, she hurries to the surgery to bribe the doctor with the contents of the pouch to sever her tongue so that she more closely resembles Elizabeth. When he loses his nerve, Joanna grabs the scalpel and does the deed herself before taking a coach out of town to marry Eli.

We continue to work backwards through the story in Chapter Three, `Genesis', which opens with Samuel (Kit Harington) and Wolf (Jack Roth) surviving a bloody argument in the wilderness over gold. In the nearby town, The Reverend is the pastor of a settlement of Dutch immigrants and he chastises his wife, Anna (Carice van Houten), for allowing their daughter, Joanna (Emilia Jones again), to pray in her native tongue. He also thrashes Anna when she refuses to sleep with him and Joanna (who has just started menstruating) peeks through the barn door during a storm to see her father brutalising her devoted mother.

Realising she has become a woman, The Reverend makes Joanna feed the hogs in the barn. He is unaware, however, that she is harbouring Samuel and Wolf after tending to their gunshots, and they are suspicious about her treatment at the hands of her father. Dismissing Anna's offer to resume her wifely duties, The Reverend declares that God has other plans for him and they become apparent after he compliments Joanna on becoming a woman after she slays her first hog in the yard.

While her parents are out, Joanna brings food for Samuel and Wolf and she abets the former when he climbs on top of the dunny roof and drops a noose over Wolf's head. He struggles to loosen the rope and even fires his gun into the wooden walls. But, as the door creaks open, he sees Joanna watching him and she has no compunction in chopping up his body for the hogs. As they eat, Samuel tells her that turning the other cheek is a sign of weakness and he urges her not to be as compliant as her mother. But Anna returns wearing a scold's bridle and hangs herself from the bell rope while her husband preaches to a full church about God conferring pain and inferiority on womankind after Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge.

As the congregation look on disapprovingly, The Reverend blames Anna for succumbing to her sins and for desecrating the temple of her body. However, he self-flagellates that night to expiate himself in preparation for marrying his daughter, who has fled the house to offer herself to Samuel in the barn. But he tells her she is too young to have such thoughts and sends her back to bed.

The following morning, The Reverend wakes Joanna and makes her teeter to the chapel on a narrow walkway across the muddy courtyard. She struggles her father declares that she will bear him many children, as Lot's daughters had done in the Bible. But, even though The Reverend forces the scold's bridle over her head, Joanna seems saved when Samuel enters with his pistol cocked. In ranting about his own abusive father, however, he allows The Reverend to grab his hand and squeeze the trigger so that a bullet lodges in his skull. Furious with her for having feelings for a stranger, he drags Joanna through the mud in her white nightgown and subjects her to a whipping before deflowering her. While he sleeps, Joanna slips out of bed and runs across the fields in terror and desperation.

By the time Chapter Four, `Retribution' opens, it's clear that Joanna/Liz has been through too much to let The Reverend prevail. Even Matthew (who has always resented Liz's presence) appreciates this as their buggy ploughs across the snowy terrain. While passing through a wood, Joanna hides behind a tree to ambush The Reverend. But he sends his horse on alone and shoots Matthew when he goes to investigate a hat in the road. Joanna cradles the dying boy in her arms and looks to the heavens as a top shot pulls away to reveal how exposed she and Sam are in this desolate landscape.

They are no safer at grandpa's, as he is murdered while babysitting and The Reverend appears from behind a tree to inform Joanna that she must suffer for causing him so much pain and trouble. He also boasts that he will make her watch as he makes a woman out of Sam and howls like a wolf as he warns his daughter about trusting false prophets in sheep's clothing. Capturing her with ease when she tries to flee, The Reverend ties Joanna to the stair post and licks his fingers after she spits in his face when he starts singing `Abide With Me'.

He proceeds to flog Sam and returns her missing doll while asking if she likes men. The sight of her child suffering her own fate gives Joanna strength, however, and she manages to lift her arms over the post and throw an oil lamp at him. Undaunted by the flames, The Reverend states that only the absence of love hurts him and Joanna blasts him through the window with her shotgun. But she is not granted the opportunity to build a new life, as a barge comes along the river to grandpa's place and Nathan introduces himself as the new sheriff of Bismuth. He explains how he found a wanted poster for Frank's murderer in the office and now takes great pleasure in arresting her as Elizabeth because there can't be too many tongueless women named Liz.

Powerless to defend herself, Joanna is taken away on the barge in chains. However, realising she won't get a fair trial, she jumps into the water and sinks with a hint of a smile on her face as Nathan fires futile shots after her. Sam turns on hearing the noise and she morphs into her adult self (Naomi Battrick) with a daughter of her own living in what is now a thriving sawmill and confident that her mother is looking after her. But, as her narration ends, she looks back into the woods, as though she has heard a noise, and we are left with the disconcerting suspicion that The Reverend might have survived after all and have merely been biding his time.

Koolhaven has made much of the fact that this self-serving hunk of frontier torture porn is a feminist tract. However, it's closer in tone to Gavin O'Connor's equally dubious Jane Got a Gun (2015) than such genuine revisionist insights into the female lot in the Old West as Maggie Greenwald's The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead (1995), Ron Howard's The Missing (2003), Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit (2010), Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2010) and Tommy Lee Jones's The Homesman (2014). Yet, curiously, the film this most resembles in its depiction of a man of the cloth using Scripture for his own sadistically hypocritical devices is Charles Laughton's sole directorial offering, The Night of the Hunter (1955).

Yet, despite sporting a scar, beard and wide-brimmed hat, Guy Pearce isn't in the same league as Robert Mitchum when it comes to malevolent menace, although his cause is hardly helped by the often risible Dutch-inflected dialogue he is asked to deliver. By dint of the fact that she is mute for much of the time, Dakota Fanning is spared such ignominy and makes the most of her silence to give a remarkable performance with her eyes. Emilia Jones also makes a solid impression as the young Joanna. But too many supporting players follow Pearce's cartoonish lead in gnawing chunks out of the scenery, which has been admirably designed by Floris Vos.

Cinematographer Rogier Stoffers also makes good use of the various German, Austrian, Hungarian and Spanish settings standing in for Anywheresville. However, he overdoes the top shots in the final chapter and abets Koolhaven in the gratuitous depiction of pitiless violence against women and girls that is invariably accompanied by the schmaltzy strains of Tom Hokenborg's old-style orchestral score. But the finger of blame can only be pointed at the director himself, who melodramatises every scene in seeking to recreate the grim reality of American backwoods life in the late 19th century. Times were harsh and brutal, particularly for women. However, Koolhaven displays the sophistication of a Cecil B. DeMille silent morality tale in laying on the voyeuristic wickedness before allowing virtue to triumph. He clearly has talent, but this execrable exploitation suggests he also seems to lack judgement.

The media had a field day when British actor Ed Skrein withdrew from Neil Marshall's forthcoming reboot of Hellboy because of the Asian origins of Major Ben Daimio. While Daniel Dae Kim took over the role with relatively little fanfare, hands were wrung about the Hollywood practice of `whitewashing' that sees white actors playing non-white characters. Skrein got off lightly, as he opted out as soon as he learned of the ethical conflict caused by his casting. But Emma Stone was castigated in certain quarters for taking the part of the quarter Hawaiian and Chinese Allison Ng in Cameron Crowe's Aloha (2015), even though the director tried to explain that the character's ethnicity was not supposed to be readily evident from her physical appearance.

While examples like Tilda Swinton's casting as a Tibetan mentor in Scott Derrickson's Doctor Strange (2016) remains objectionable, whitewashing is nowhere near as prevalent and pernicious as the policy of Yellow, Brown and Blackface casting during the Hollywood studio era. Yet few bat an eyelid when an able-bodied performer essays someone with a physical or psychological disability. Indeed, as Kate Winslet joked during her cameo in Ricky Gervais's sharply satirical Extras (2005-07), actors cast as differently able characters stand a much better chance of snagging an Oscar nomination. And one only has to mention Jane Wyman's Best Actress win for playing a deaf girl in Jean Negulesco's Johnny Belinda (1948) and Daniel Day-Lewis's Best Actor victory for his performance as cerebral palsied artist Christy Brown in Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot (1989) to prove her point.

Exceptions do exist, of course, with double amputee Harold Russell winning two Academy Awards for his work in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and the profoundly deaf Marlee Matlin took the Best Actress prize for Randa Haines's Children of a Lesser God (1986). Moreover, earlier this year, CJ Jones (who lost his hearing during a childhood bout of spinal meningitis) played Ansol Elgort's deaf foster father in Edgar Wright's Baby Driver. Yet there were still complaints that Elgort himself does not have a hearing impairment, while the casting of Eddie Redmayne in James Marsh's The Theory of Everything (2014) was also censured by some, even though Stephen Hawking approved of a performance that required the actor to show how his character's body was gradually ravaged by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It will be interesting, therefore, to see what the wider response will be to the pairing in Hungarian sophomore Attila Till's Kills on Wheels of the able-bodied Szabolcs Thuróczy with Zoltán Fenyvesi and Adám Fekete, who have respectively been wheelchair-bound since birth and diagnosed with cerebral palsy.

Having survived a three-year stint in a prison for inmates with physical disabilities, Szabolcs Thuróczy checks out the care home where 20 year-old wheelchair user Zoltán Fenyvesi is working on a graphic novel with an anti-hero who looks rather like the paraplegic Thuróczy with his cerebral palsy-suffering roommate, Adám Fekete. When they steal a fire extinguisher to shoot against the outside wall, they get a clip round the ear from Thuróczy, who used to be a firefighter before losing the use of his legs in an accident. But he takes a shine to them for showing pluck in answering him back and signs them into a trendy nightclub, where he gets them drunk and offers them jobs as his assistant.

Thuróczy is particularly interested in Fekete, as he has a driving licence. However, he is happy for Fenyvesi to tag along, even though he suffers from such excruciating back pain that he frequently needs to flatten out to ease the pressure on his spine. Doctor Björn Freiberg informs Fenyvesi's mother, Mónika Balsai, that he needs a crucial operation in Stuttgart. But Fenyvesi is reluctant to accept money from the father who abandoned him after his birth and refuses to consent to the life-saving surgery.

Back in his bed, Fenyvesi looks at the crime drawings around his bed and one morphs into the scene of Thuróczy meeting with Serbain crime lord Dusan Vitanovics, who goes everywhere with his fearsome foursome of Dobermans. He gives Thuróczy a package containing a gun and questions whether he is confident that a paralysed man in a wheelchair can carry out an assassination. The bullish Thuróczy has no doubts and sits in a car park in full view of the snack kiosk where Fenyvesi and Fekete are buying a lunch. A vehicle crawls past Thuróczy and four thugs get out. They wander over when he identifies himself as their contact. But their leader is sceptical and stabs a knife into Thuróczy's. The heavy is unnerved when Thuróczy doesn't so much as flinch and produces a gun from a yellow carrier back to mow down his prey and wheel himself nonchalantly to a stunned Fenyvesi and Fekete waiting in the getaway car.

They drive him to the nearby hospital, where nurse Lidia Danis tends to his wound. She used to be his girlfriend, but she has moved on while he was in prison and she breaks the news that she is going to marry the fiancé who disapproves of her having anything to do with Thuróczy. Furious and bitter, he goes home and drinks while thinking back about his fall from being a hero to a petty thief after his accident and he wheels himself to the steep steps of a nearby flyover and throws himself forward.

By contrast, Fekete and Fenyvesi return to their care home and sit in with an art class while they work on their book. Across the city, however, Vitanovics is attacked by two gunmen in a passing car while walking his dogs. Having been hit in the arm, he unmuzzles the three surviving Dobermans and orders them to show no mercy, as they smash through the windscreen and maul the shooters to death. He sports a sling when he meets up with Thuróczy, who is none the worse for his tumble. Vitanovics smiles on hearing that Thuróczy liquidated all four of his moral foe's henchmen. It amuses him that no one suspects Thuróczy because he's in a wheelchair, but he warns him that their collaboration will end the moment he fouls up or leaves a trail of clues. He also informs Thuróczy that he wants him to rub out his rival's slimeball lawyer, although he admits he is a tough target, as he never goes anywhere without a bodyguard.

While Balsai keeps trying to talk Fenyvesi into accepting his father's money and travelling to Germany, he delights in taunting Thuróczy, who is attempting to walk using leg braces and some parallel bars. They haven't spoken since the car park incident and Fenyvesi reassures Thuróczy that he hasn't called the police. Unamused at feeling vulnerable in front of someone he considers an inferior, Thuróczy leans forward to menace Fenyvesi, but succeeds only in falling over and has to stay on the floor while Fenyvesi clambers out of his chair to lie beside him and play some music while they wait for the physios to assist them.

Fekete and Fenyvesi take their drawings to a comic-book convention, but the publishers are mostly unimpressed. One offers to reconsider if they win the amateur prize at a forthcoming comi-con and they try to celebrate with a treat from a vending machine. However, Fekete's condition means that his hands shake when he goes to press the buttons and they wind up with pretzels instead of fizzy water. Thuróczy also has a disappointment when he buys flowers for Danis but she doesn't even notice him as she drives off with her chap. But Thuróczy refuses to give up on her and also surprises Vitanovics when he comes up with a plan to eradicate the lawyer.

With Fenyvesi and Fekete positioned at points across the square in front of St Stephen's Basilica, Thuróczy begins feeding the pigeons while his target finishes his lunch at an outdoor restaurant. As he walks away, Thuróczy kills him with a single bullet from a silenced pistol hidden in the bag of bird seed and a watching Vitanovics seems impressed by the efficiency and anonymity of the hit. But Fenyvesi proves less discreet when he tells Freiberg to stop interfering in his life and berates Balsai for lying to protect his father. She insists that they split because she had to remain in Hungary because she was Olympic champion, but Fenyvesi declares he would rather die than let his father salve his conscience by paying for his operation.

He is still in a foul temper when Thuróczy finishes another therapy session and struggles to understand why someone would willingly let themselves die. But Fenyvesi says he is tired of being the crippled one and wants someone else to suffer for a while instead. Thuróczy offers to take him for a meal to cheer him up. But, when he asks Vitanovics for his fee, the Serb tips him out of his chair and threatens to set the dogs on him for breaking his vow to work alone. He orders Thuróczy to rub out his partners or face the consequences.

Needing to make their deaths look like an accident, Thuróczy proposes a fishing expedition to the reed marshes outside Budapest. They are hampered by the fact the battery expires on Fenyvesi's electric chair and Thuróczy has to carry him on his lap. But they get to the jetty and are busy chatting about the disabled in Sweden and Denmark receiving sex vouchers when Thuróczy pushes Fekete into the water when he gets a bite and launches Fenyvesi after him when he yells that his friend can't swim. They splash around for a while, as Thuróczy waits patiently for them to drown. But, as he turns to leave, his firefighting instinct kicks in and he plunges off the decking to rescue them.

Drying out by a campfire, Thuróczy gives Fenyvesi a gun as a gift and they agree to have a party with three of the physio assistants. They all get drunk at Thuróczy's shabby flat and Fekete enjoys flirting with one girl, while Fenyvesi cuddles another sat on his knee. Thuróczy mentions Danis to his companion (as she has invited him to the wedding) and she offers to help surprise her by loaning him the leg braces and propping him up outside the nurse's home so that he looks like his old self again. He agrees to the scheme and the three women guide him across the road and leave him leaning against a taxi parked at the kerb. When Danis fails to show, Fenyvevi suggests phoning her and Thuróczy is disappointed to find that she isn't working today and is teaching somewhere else in the city.

Fenyvesi makes up with Balsai and asks why she didn't remarry or have any more children. She hugs him by way of an answer and he doesn't push the point. Vitanovics also takes Thuróczy's word when he reports that Fekete and Fenyvesi drowned. Instead, he buys him some pork chops while out shopping for his dogs (one of whom is a diabetic on a special diet). He also confides the whereabouts of his nemesis and Thuróczy agrees to do the hit, which he insists will be his swan song.

Once again, Fenyvesi and Fekete draw on their comic-book imagination to come up with an ingenious plan and use art class materials to secrete a gun inside Thuróczy's wheelchair cushion. He talks his way inside the stronghold and, even though his claim to be the gangster's cellmate fails to hold water, it buys him enough time to get clean shots at the henchmen and their boss. However, he needs Fekete to ram the security gate in order to make good his escape, while Fenyvesi plays the innocent man in a wheelchair to send the cops reporting to an emergency call on a wild goose chase.

Relieved to have got out unscathed, Thuróczy informs Fenyvesi and Fekete that they are more trouble than they are worth and that he wants to terminate their relationship. However, Vitanovics discovers that he failed to kill his cohorts and he leaves Thuróczy dangling from a noose in an empty warehouse. Luckily, he still has enough upper-body strength to pull himself up and loosen the rope. But he smuggles Fekete and Fenyvesi out of the home and hides them at his apartment, where they hatch a plan to attach a tracker to Vitanovics's car so that Thuróczy can dispose of him after Danis's wedding.

Unfortunately, Thuróczy gets drunk during the reception and tries to kiss Danis before hijacking the microphone to sing her a song. Eventually, members of the groom's entourage haul him outside to give him a beating. But Thuróczy has invited Fenyvesi along and he rolls into the courtyard behind the hotel to pull his pistol on them and Thuróczy promises Danis that he won't bother her again, as they drive away.

Meanwhile, Fekete and a couple of pals have bugged Vitanovics's car and they wait until darkness falls and his guard detail goes off duty to strike. Waiting for Vitanovics to return after walking the dogs, Thuróczy and Fenyvesi demand their money and he taunts them by leaving the key to the safe on his desk and challenging them to steal it. Thuróczy frightens the Dobermans by letting off a fire extinguisher and, when Vitanovics fatally attacks him with a knife, Fenyvesi shoots him dead and takes enough money to pay for his operation.

Fekete and Fenyvesi complete their novel, which they call Kills on Wheels. As he prepares to go into theatre, we see a package being delivered to his father in Germany. He looks like a tidier version of Thuróczy and it turns out that Fenyvasi had based the character of the firefighter-turned-disabled-assassin on the only photograph he had ever seen of his father. The man opens the parcel with his two children from his second marriage and he is surprised to hear from his son after such a long silence.

Four months later, Fenyvesi and Fekete attend comic-con. They fail to win the amateur prize, but one female judge is sufficiently impressed with their work to offer them a deal. She even likes the deodorant that Fekete has been spraying on his clothing throughout the story. As the woman congratulates them, Fekete and Fenyvesi shoot each other a grin a satisfaction.

There's a scene in Family Guy, in which Brian suggests to Stewie that the surprise ending to the two-part story in which Lois is presumed murdered is such an insult to the intelligence that it's akin to giving the audience the finger. Some may consider the last-reel twist in this engaging saga to be similarly glib. But Attila Till just about gets away with it, as no one could ever mistake this tale of a paraplegic hitman for a slice of social realism. Indeed, in its use of drawings and animations as scenic transitions, it resembles Gabriele Mainetti's They Call Me Jeeg Robot (2015), which also played fast and loose with the real and the imagined.

Besides, Till is entitled to a little leeway because of his bold casting of Zoltán Fenyvesi and Adám Fekete, whose ease in front of the camera is matched by Szabolcs Thuróczy's creditable bid to play a man of action dealing with the bodily and emotional pain of losing the ability to walk. Something of an Instagram celebrity on account of his activism and his handbike marathon exploits, Fenyvesi carries most of the emotional weight, even though Fekete is the more experienced performer as a member of the TAP Theatre Company. More mobile than his co-star, he is mostly used for his driving skills and as comic relief, as he constantly sprays himself to keep cool with a fragrance everyone but the female publisher finds overpowering.

Often keeping the camera at low angles to approximate the perspective of a person in a chair, Imre Juhasz achieves some arresting and amusing visuals, while editor Márton Gothár abets production designer Márton Agh in neatly contrasting the worlds that Fenyvesi and Fekete inhabit and imagine. Composer Csaba Kalotás also contributes a score that slips unobtrusively between intimacy and dynamism. Moreover, Till makes Thuróczy and the hissably cynophilic Dusán Vitanovics such an integral part of the core action that only the very alert will twig their true identity before the big reveal. But, for all the fun he has in staging the darkly quirky hits, Till never forgets his aim of disproving the myths surrounding disability and his bid to do his bit for cine-diversity. For these intentions alone, he deserves great credit.