The copy I watched was atrocious: It sporadically morphed to digital mush, and there was a 7-minute stretch where the audio flipped to a (bad) Spanish dubbed version. It started off as a run-of-the-mill B-Western, but it gradually morphed into surreal, balls-out, nightmarish horror. When Apaches with full-body paint started jumping through the windows, I was completely sold. The movie occasionally acknowledges the plight of native Americans, but basically the Apaches are stand-ins for ultimate, terrifying otherness, a supernatural evil that lurks in the American heartland, always on the verge of pouncing to annihilate the isolated, fragile white settler community.

Elegant and poignant in its depiction of decaying past glory, but there's a barrage of semi-magical resolutions in the last third that brushes away the class and economic realities it worked so hard to establish, and somewhat blunts its power. The final shot of Setsuko Hara's radiant face can't help but be lyrical.

City prick goes to a remote village to shoot a funeral, flirts with a peasant, rides a motorcycle in a field of wheat. The bottomless beauty of the cosmos.