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An easy (and not necessarily inaccurate) way to describe writer/director John Maclean's debut feature Slow West is that it feels like a movie that was co-directed by Wes Anderson and John Ford: It has the former's deadpan absurdism and extremely precise compositions, and the latter's interest in playing around with the iconography of the Wild West. Yet this film is bigger and weirder than just a successful mash-up of two very different sensibilities, and in the span of 84 minutes, it manages to blend a number of genres (Western, buddy comedy, existential horror, action, love story) into something that's even greater than the sum of its parts.

Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Jay Cavendish, a young Scottish noble who travels to frontier America in search of his true love Rose (Caren Pistorius). Unfortunately, he has zero survival skills and little common sense, and he needs to be saved from certain death within the first few minutes of the film. His rescuer is a taciturn bounty hunter named Silas (Michael Fassbender), who offers to be his guide in exchange for all of his money. Realizing that he has few other options, Jay agrees, and when Silas gets several opportunities to take off with his cash and instead sticks around, the young man concludes that his protector is a decent man who's looking for a friend. What Jay doesn't realize, however, is that Rose and her father (Rory McCann) are wanted for murder, and he's inadvertently leading Silas directly to his prey.

The movie gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast between Smit-McPhee and Fassbender, whose characters, acting styles, and physical appearances couldn't be more different. Smit-McPhee looks like a Boy Scout and acts a forlorn dreamer out of an indie romantic comedy; he's so green that each new obstacle on his journey seems like it's sure to be the one that will put him in the ground. Fassbender, on the other hand, is the kind of guy who looks like he has to shave three times a day, and with the help of a credible American accent, he's absolutely convincing as a Western hero in the same mold as Clint Eastwood's iconic The Man With No Name. Yet it's typical of the movie's richness that both of these men contain traces of the other deep down: Jay's love for Rose gives him a fearlessness perhaps even greater than his companion, while Silas (who narrates the film) isn't as heartless as he pretends. That complexity makes their partnership feel like something with real weight and stakes, and it makes the moment when they catch up with Rose and turn enemies electrifying.

Ironically, this riff on Western tropes was actually shot in New Zealand, with a cast that includes a German-born Irishman playing an American (Fassbender), an Australian playing a Scot (Smit-McPhee), and an Australian playing an American (Ben Mendelsohn, who has the most dishonest-looking face in modern cinema, shows up here as the leader of a gang of outlaws). The look of the film isn't exactly surreal, but there's definitely something off-kilter about it that you can't quite put your finger on. Maclean uses that disorientation to his advantage by crafting a story that feels more like a fable set in the Old West rather than anything approaching reality, which in turns helps sell the movie's wild tonal shifts: It moves effortlessly from bizarre laughs to sudden violence to quiet character moments and back again, all without abandoning its singular tone. Maclean even manages to turn the final shoot-out into something that feels utterly unique, thrilling and heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measure, and with a visual style all its own (there's an unforgettable shot of the band of outlaws popping up out of a wheat field like the targets in a Whack-a-Mole game).

There are some who will argue that Slow West, like the work of Anderson or the Coen brothers, is too heavily stylized to have much of an emotional pull. And the ending, in truth, doesn't feel like a perfect fit for everything that's come before. Yet this is still an astonishingly assured first film, one that synthesizes familiar ingredients into something that's wildly entertaining and feels new. More than that, it heralds the arrival of a major new talent in John Maclean.