But Gideon will not go down easy. Even wounded, without a horse and with only a large knife to use as a weapon he's still got plenty of fight left in him. And although the Civil War has left this form Union officer weary of violence and conflict he'd not above inflicting a bit of deadly chaos if it means saving his own life.

Seraphim Falls is a primal, esoteric, brutally nightmarish outdoor Western that hits the ground running and then refuses to let up. It is a pulsating thriller, so violent and bloody even the most hardened gore hound will walk away after feeling more than a tad squeamish. This movie is hardcore and decidedly unapologetic for being so, this viscerally-charged adventure an adult morality tale unafraid to push its audience right to the edge of their very limit and then leave them dangling.

Yet it is the emotional layering that makes writer/director David Von Ancken's theatrical debut so fantastic an entertainment. What at first appears to be nothing more than a straight ahead outdoor chase picture subtly morphs into something blissfully more. Gideon and Carver share the history of a single moment that torments them both. One becomes a killer, the other an outcast, neither man able to find a way to get over a tragedy the inability of which proving to be a recipe for nothing more than their own mutual disaster.

All of which makes the film utterly fascinating. Really nothing more than an existential action flick where the terrain and countryside engulfing the protagonists becomes a character unto itself, Seraphim Falls is a surreal blending of movies like Clint Eastwood's High Planes Drifter, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Peter Hunt’s Death Hunt (a 1981 B-movie with Charles Bronsan and Lee Marvin that only seems to get better with age). It is a magnificent mind-bending descent into mayhem and madness, the price of revenge so devastating neither man can remotely fathom where the endgame will ultimately take him.

Not all of this works. Von Ancken and co-writer Abby Everett Jaques isn't big on narrative and is even less weighty in regards to character development. What you see is what you get, this foray into psychological disaster not as surprising as the filmmakers would probably like to believe. More, actors like Angelica Huston, Michael Wincott, Ed Lauter, Tom Noonan, Robert Baker and Kevin J. O'Connor pop up for intriguing moments, yet none of them lasting long enough to make much of a concrete impression.

Thankfully none of this matters a whole heck of a lot. Neeson and Brosnan are incredible, their tortured and multifaceted portrayals going far beyond the movie's rather simplistic storyline. By the time the film goes from the subzero top of the American West down to the blistering heat of its never-ending deserts both actors have painted portraits impossible to dismiss. These are tortured individuals, men running from demons they can't fathom let alone escape, both actors making the cascading emotions assaulting them so real I could almost feel their tears running languidly down my very own cheek.

It's only the fourth week of a new year and already a movie has made me sit up and take notice. From the great John Toll's (Braveheart, Legends of the Fall) Oscar-worthy cinematography, to stunt work so phenomenal it blows the mind, this post-war character study is as good as it gets. The film is a January surprise of the highest degree, Seraphim Falls a stunning Western impossible to forget.

Film Rating: êêê1/2  (out of 4)