Now available on DVD and Blu-Ray

David Gordon Green / USA / 2013 / 112 mins

We are in the hard-drinking Texan backwoods with Joe (Nicolas Cage), a gangmaster whose day labourers are employed to illegally poison trees so that a forestry company can fell them in order to grow hardier, more profitable ones. This dead weight allegory applies to the male characters, whose lives have been blighted by poverty and booze. Joe gives work to a trailer-trash lad, Gary (Tye Sheridan who featured in 2012’s Mud), and his perma-sozzled no-good dad (Gary Poulter). The boy is desperate to earn enough money to take him, his mother and abused sister as far away from his hopeless father as possible.

Joe sees his younger self in the boy – the contrast between fresh-faced Gary and Joe with his beard like a mangy sporran is all too stark. Joe is one of several poisoned-dog bad guys with anger issues in the movie. His girlfriend tells Gary ‘you know you don’t need to take no shit from nobody’; that great macho mantra. Joe openly acknowledges that what keeps him alive and out of prison is restraint, but that anger is always near the surface.

Inevitably, Joe attempts to mentor Gary and act as a father figure despite the murderous rage and degradation all around. But the badass plot is not the main attraction here: it’s mood and characterisation that’s so beguiling. Cinematographer Tim Orr gives the shabby backgrounds a kind of lush awfulness, bathing everything that’s bruised or broken in a dusty golden light. There is also an unsettling clanking soundtrack from David Wingo and Jeff McIlwain.

Then there’s Cage’s character, the somewhat hackneyed ex-con with a heart of gold. The challenge here is for Cage to match the naturalistic, nonprofessional actors – like his crew of hatchet men in the woods and the boy’s father (much has been made of the fact that Gary Poulter, a real-life homeless alcoholic, was found dead facedown in a ditch two months after shooting was completed). Thankfully, Cage turns in a finely nuanced, believable performance and one of his best in recent years.

Director David Gordon Green has produced a slow burn of a picture, where the women live in the shadows as the men threaten to spin out of control. Some of the metaphors are all too obvious – deadly snakes, vicious dogs – yet the story’s frightening climax with Cage, at his scary-faced best, is well worth the wait.