Slow West

John Maclean came to feature filmmaking from music: a Scottish artist and musician, he is best known for his work with the Beta Band. Slow West, his debut, is a UK–New Zealand co-production made with Film4, and it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015, where it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in the dramatic competition. It opened in American cinemas and on demand simultaneously that May, and earned Maclean a nomination for the Douglas Hickox Award for best debut director at the British Independent Film Awards.

Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Jay Cavendish, a well-born sixteen-year-old who has followed Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius) from the Scottish Highlands to the American frontier, armed with more romance than sense. Michael Fassbender is Silas Selleck, the Irish bounty hunter Jay hires as a guide, and Ben Mendelsohn is Payne, the leader of Silas's old gang. New Zealand stands in for 1870 Colorado, but Maclean insisted that the Highland flashbacks had to be shot in Scotland, and filmed them in Wester Ross. Robbie Ryan's photography turns the landscape into a pop-up picture book, bright and faintly unreal, and the whole journey is told in a trim 84 minutes.

The film was received as an unusually confident first work. It holds a 92 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and New York magazine's Bilge Ebiri described an absurdist, melancholy coming-of-age tale that jumps from odd comedy to striking violence. It sits in the lineage of the revisionist Western, filtered through a dry European sensibility; Maclean returned to features a decade later with Tornado (2025).