The Dark Valley

Andreas Prochaska's The Dark Valley (2014) is that rare and striking thing, an Alpine western — a revenge tale that transplants the conventions of the American frontier myth to a forbidding nineteenth-century mountain village. A German-Austrian production, it was Austria's submission for the foreign-language Oscar and swept the major German and Austrian film awards.

Sam Riley plays the taciturn stranger whose arrival unsettles the patriarchal clan controlling the valley, in a film that fuses the iconography of the spaghetti western — the lone avenger, the lawless settlement, the long-simmering reckoning — with the snowbound grandeur of the high Alps. Prochaska directs with genre relish and visual sweep, the brooding landscape and an anachronistic rock-tinged score giving the familiar revenge structure a fresh, eerie charge. The violence, when it comes, is sudden and stylised.

The film was a substantial hit and earned wide praise for its craft and its audacious genre transplant, proving German-language cinema could mount a muscular, atmospheric thriller to rival international competitors. Handsome, tense and satisfyingly mythic, The Dark Valley is a distinctive entertainment — a western in lederhosen that takes its archetypes seriously and delivers them with style. It remains one of the most purely enjoyable European genre films of its decade. Riley's brooding stranger and the snowbound grandeur give the revenge plot a mythic weight, and the film's audacious transplant of the western to the Alps remains one of European genre cinema's most satisfying surprises.