The brilliant and pitiless Quentin Tarantino now gives us a vast American epic set mostly in just one room. In fact, the various sections and corners of that room start to feel as distant as cities or deserts. At one stage, a character suggests dividing this space to represent the Unionist North and Confederate South, and it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine, although the slippery brutal amoralism of one and all is such that tribal-loyalty partition was never going to work.



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Tarantino has created another breathtakingly stylish and clever film, a Jacobean western, intimate yet somehow weirdly colossal, once again releasing his own kind of unwholesome crazy-funny-violent nitrous oxide into the cinema auditorium for us all to inhale. Moreover, Tarantino now makes a serious star of Walton Goggins, giving a hilarious performance as the deeply unreliable Chris Mannix, soi-disant Sheriff Elect of Red Rock, Wyoming. And Ennio Morricone has composed a score which is as sinuous and catchy as anything he has written: a theme with a tense and gloomy tread, coolly cranking up the tension.

The Booker-winning novelist Marlon James has this year been called “Tarantinoesque” and what The Hateful Eight does is remind you that this comparison is not just about the violence or the energy: it’s about the writing. Tarantino is just a superlative movie writer, glorying in protracted dialogue scenes for which other film-makers don’t have the attention-span, in scenes unapologetically described as “Chapters”. His writing delivers line-by-line pleasure and impact and he is also a master of structural audacity, with some superb flashback-rewinds and POV-shifts.

The setting is the unhealed Old West after the Civil War: a freezingly wintry and mountainous terrain. Kurt Russell plays the bewhiskered John Ruth, a bounty hunter who is in a stage-coach pulled by a six-horse team, conducting a prisoner across difficult country in a gathering blizzard to the town of Red Rock. This is the fiercely unrepentant criminal Daisy Domergue, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. On the road, they encounter another bounty hunter: Major Marquis Warren, a Unionist veteran with an unhappy war record, but proud of having once received a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln, a document he keeps on his person at all times. Warren has a couple of criminal-corpses which he needs to cash in at Red Rock. He is played by Samuel L Jackson and this is another glorious comic performance from Jackson: glittering of eye, steely of will, vengeful of manner; his presence is as potent as a nugget of sodium. The ingratiating good ol’ boy Chris Mannix also makes an appearance.

The weather worsens and they find themselves needing a stopover at a roadhouse called Minnie’s Haberdashery; here they encounter ageing Southern General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) taciturn loner Joe Cage (Michael Madsen), and a insinuatingly charmless Englishman called Oswaldo Mowbray (Tim Roth). Somehow, these ruthless strangers will have to make the best of things until the road clears. But are these people strangers to each other? Why is there a jelly bean on the floor? Is something else going on?

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The Hateful Eight are snowed in together like Agatha Christie characters in a country house, or indeed the Big Brother house. But unlike an Agatha Christie story — but very much like, say, Reservoir Dogs — there is no notional authority figure to exert control over everyone. The only authority is violence and superior firepower, or the superior firepower of talk — the threat of violence. Everyone is armed of course, and there are other weapons to hand, and the mere presence of criminals with bounties on their heads creates a market force in favour of violence. The pre-violence tension, including the scattershot N-bombing, is unbearable, and coolly sustained by the dialogue. It is itself a kind of violence and leads to a quite extraordinary climax just before the Intermission. That, along with the Overture, is part of the film’s old-fashioned furniture.

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There is a little of Sergio Leone and the classic pulp westerns of Elmore Leonard, and as a big drama in a little place it could almost be a Sam Peckinpah version of a swearified Harold Pinter. Later, for obvious reasons, it will look like Brian DePalma’s Carrie. But this movie is just so utterly distinctive, it really could be by no-one else but Tarantino. The inventive, swaggering dialogue is what drives it onward: quintessentially American. (I continue to think that Inglourious Basterds the weakest of Tarantino’s films because he strays away from the American wellspring.) And The Hateful Eight repeats a classic trope from Reservoir Dogs: the idea of being in unbearable pain from a gunshot wound, but still talking, still being a threat. There is a horrible kind of black-comic heroism in continuing to threaten and crack wise while being in the same kind of unbearable agony you are planning to inflict on someone else. “Thriller” is a generic label which has lost its force. But The Hateful Eight thrills.

• The Hateful Eight is released in the US on 25 December and in the UK on 8 January