Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson

Running Time: 115 min

Sometimes a film is worthy of your time because it is crammed with intricate twists and wondrous details that keep you guessing all the way through. And sometimes it appeals because it tells a straight, simple and, in most part, well-worn tale in a solid, honest manner that makes it not stale, but comfortably familiar, like an old pair of boots. Seraphim Falls is one such comfort fit.

Seraphim Falls is a Wild West story, one that, unlike so many entries in the genre, occurs in a true wilderness. Hitting the ground without any preamble, the entire film unfolds as one extended chase sequence. Pierce Brosnan is introduced to us as Gideon, a man on the run from Carver (Liam Neeson) and his hired posse. Apart from brief glimpses of Gideon's nightmares we are given no explanation to the reason behind this manhunt until significantly ahead in the narrative. Till then what we see is a conflict stripped to its most primal form: one character's need to survive and another's desire to kill him.

This savage and primal nature of the plot is strikingly reflected in the way it is shot. Moving from snow-covered mountainous forest to rocky plateaus to seemingly endless desert, the film depicts nature not as a series of postcard-pretty backgrounds, but a character in itself, testing the endurance and inner will of the characters to the very bounds. Thanks to superb lens-work by cinematographer John Toll (The Thin Red Line), we can almost feel the icy freeze of the mountains and the searing sand-peppered desert air.

What also helps is the admirable way the veteran actors have grounded their roles. Pierce Brosnan's Gideon has all the ruggedness of a character that will survive harrowing trials, while Liam Neeson's Carver convinces of his bitter determination to hunt his quarry. The film takes care to keep our viewpoints of the characters neutral, although initially most of our sympathies are apt to lie with the survivor. Certain parts of the film bear a passing resemblance to the first Rambo outing First Blood, mainly in Gideon, who among other things shares a tendency to get kills with a large serrated knife.

Under the steady baton of David Von Ancken who had up to this point been mostly a TV director, the film shows the continuing hunter-prey interactions of Gideon and Carver, mostly concentrating on delivering a ruggedly credible experience. It also reveals the reason behind Carver's murderous hatred. Towards the end Seraphim Falls veers suddenly into the territory of the surreal film, with a cameo by Anjelica Huston as a Satan-like barterer Mme Louise Fair (hardly a subtle allusion there) who, in the midst of open desert, takes away the men's most precious possessions, water and horses, to give them guns to complete their mutual rituals of violence. Thus the film marches to its final resolution, which I leave you to find out.

While sparse in storyline and characters, and holding few surprises, Seraphim Falls impresses with its keen visual sense and robust flavorsome telling of that oldest of human tales - the survival story.