Sparse, cruel tale of evil

The Quarry (M, 100 mins) Directed by Scott Teems Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★

It is a truth acknowledged by all people who watch far too many movies for their own good, that any film that starts with the credit ‘‘West Texas’’ is unlikely to turn out to be a romantic comedy, a musical, or even to end with everyone on screen still physically intact.

That arid, pitiless landscape has been home to Lone Star, Blood Simple, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country For Old Men.

It is where dreams come to die, where bastards come to hide and where film-makers and writers looking for an effortless metaphor

The Quarry does enough to pass as an absorbing drama of the evil that men do.

for their pessimistic view of the human condition come to set up shop. Plus, I hear the tax breaks are pretty competitive.

The Quarry is the second filmed adaptation of Damon Galgut’s novel. The original takes place in the author’s native South Africa, but West Texas makes a perfect setting for this sparse and cruel tale, with its few turning points linked by languid and minutely observed stretches of time.

Shea Whigham (Joker) is the drifter who blows into town. We know that he has killed a man for no reason other than that he asked too many questions.

That man was travelling to take up a job as the local priest, and Whigham’s nameless protagonist, for reasons that only make sense if we assume a lot about him that the film is not telling us, decides to take up the job himself.

Despite speaking no Spanish for his largely Mexican congregation, and having little knowledge of the Bible, he is a hit. The locals are happy to project their own version of what a good priest should be on to Whigham’s impassive and mostly wordless features.

But, when the desiccated body of the man’s hapless victim turns up, it looks very much like his past is about to catch up with him

The town’s implacable and watchful sheriff seems finally ready to look past his racist assumptions and wonder if the white visitor might be the guilty party, and not the local petty thief he has collared for the crime.

The Quarry is a film with a lot happening in the white spaces between the words on the page.

Whigham’s duel of wills with the sheriff – played quite brilliantly by Michael Shannon, with his Tommy Lee Jones channel dialled up to 11 – mostly plays out in a series of exquisitely wry and loaded exchanges in which words are the least of what passes between the men.

Bobby Soto is excellent as Valentin, the wrongly accused man in the sheriff’s cells. And Catalina Moreno is similarly effective, negotiating a tightrope of shifting loyalties as Celia, the sheriff’s lover and landlord to Whigham’s pretend priest.

The Quarry does enough to pass as an absorbing, if slightly understuffed, drama of the evil that men do. To ever so unfairly evoke No Country For Old Men, it ain’t great, but it’ll do ’til a great one gets here.