The western is a genre that cinema has never really abandoned, even when it seemed to have relegated it to the margins. Every now and then it returns with great titles capable of imposing themselves in the debate, other times it re-emerges in more secluded, hard, unconciliatory films, destined to find their audience slowly. They are works that do not try to update the myth of the frontier by making it easier to consume, but use it to look inside its wounds, in the traumas left by violence and in the contradictions on which a fundamental part of the American imagination has been built. Among these is Hostiles, a 2017 film directed by Scott Cooper, one of those westerns that perhaps did not receive all the attention they deserved.
Starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike and Wes Studi, Hostiles is set in 1892 and follows Captain Joseph J. Blocker, a US Army officer now worn out by years of war and hatred. Blocker is a man consumed by his past, forced to perform one last assignment that he initially experiences as a humiliation: escorting the Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk, his old enemy, now sick, and his family to the tribal lands in Montana. The journey starts from New Mexico and soon turns into a physical and moral journey through a hostile country, crossed by grudges, mourning and violence that have never really been overcome.
Along the way, Blocker and his group meet Rosalee Quaid, a woman left alone after the massacre of her family. It’s one of the toughest elements of the film, because Cooper doesn’t use brutality as a simple visual shock, but as a starting point to tell characters who no longer know how to be in the world after losing everything. Hostiles is not an adventure western in the classic sense of the term: it is a dark film, slow in pace but tense in substance, built around men and women who carry the weight of the frontier as a sentence.
The greatness of the film lies precisely in the refusal to trivialize the characters. Blocker is not presented as a hero to be redeemed easily, nor Yellow Hawk as a mere symbolic figure. The relationship between the two is born from hatred and blood, but during the journey it becomes something more complex: not a pacified reconciliation, but the laborious recognition of the other’s pain. In this sense, Hostiles works on profoundly western themes, but he tackles them with a modern gaze: guilt, racism, the memory of violence, the impossibility of erasing what has been done.
Christian Bale offers one of his most restrained and painful interpretations, made up of silences, downcast glances and sentences reduced to the essentials. His Blocker seems like a man who has unlearned any form of tenderness, and for this reason the change of character never appears rhetorical. Next to him, Rosamund Pike gives substance to an almost unbearable pain, while Wes Studi brings to the film a serious, measured presence, fundamental to prevent the story from becoming only the inner journey of the white protagonist.
Upon its release, Hostiles got overall positive reactions, but not enough to turn it into a case. Critics have recognized its visual strength and Bale’s performance, while also pointing out some imbalances in the narrative. The public welcomed it with greater warmth, but the film never really broke through at the box office: in the face of an important cast and an ambitious production plant, it grossed about 35.7 million dollars worldwide. Numbers that are not disastrous in an absolute sense, but insufficient to make it one of those titles capable of remaining at the center of the conversation.
And it’s a shame, because Hostiles belongs to that category of films that grow in memory. It is not a perfect western, and perhaps this is why it is so interesting: it is rough, severe, at times even repulsive, but it has a rare coherence in telling violence not as a show, but as a legacy. In an era in which the genre has found new life between revisionism, seriality and auteur returns, Scott Cooper’s film remains an underrated pearl: a brutal and melancholic western that would have deserved more space, more attention and perhaps even more time to be understood.
