The Hateful Eight does not seem likely to end up as anyone’s favorite Quentin Tarantino film, but it may be his most important. Tarantino has been exploring the landscape of revenge for four films now. In Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 he brought all manner of stylized violence to the screen culminating in the killing of a man who didn’t seem to live up to the hatred the main character felt. In Inglorious Basterds he put our own love of violence at odds with Nazis reveling in the deaths of American soldiers. In Django Unchained his hero took vengeance on the entire concept of slavery by proxy.

But where all of those films had a liberal dose of cinematic sugar to help the medicine go down, The Hateful Eight slides down the gullet bitter and sticky. It feels like the end of a journey, of a man who has realized that when you give an audience sugar with their medicine, you only create an audience addicted to sugar.

The film opens with the image of a stone crucifix, the face of Jesus filling the frame, weather worn and draped in snow, looking more like a monster than a man. A stage coach rides past the cross through the white blanket of snow, shortly stopping in front of another figure: a black man seated atop three dead bodies in the middle of the road.

These are the images that set the tone for the rest of the movie, a stagecoach with a lawman and a criminal caught between a stone-dead god and man’s cruel justice.

The lawman is John “The Hangman” Ruth a bounty hunter whose defining characteristic is his insistence on bringing in his bounties alive. The criminal is Daisy Domergue, a rough woman whose head is worth ten thousand dollars to the Hangman. The black man is Major Warren, a Civil War veteran turned bounty hunter. After an uneasy negotiation, John Ruth takes Major Warren in to his care, and the stage coach rolls on until it encounters another traveler lost on the freezing road, a former confederate soldier turned sheriff. This odd posse makes their way to Minnie’s Haberdashery where they find four more men taking shelter from the oncoming storm.

The feel of the film isn’t quite like anything else Tarantino has ever done. It’s still unmistakably his work, but where many of his other films feel wild and bombastic, The Hateful Eight seems staid and contemplative. The whole story unfolds like a play. Dialogue has always been one of Tarantino’s greatest strengths, but here the words go on and on, a string of seemingly endless introductions and explanations and negotiations.

The mystery that unfolds in the movie’s three hour run time isn’t truly a mystery at all. It runs in a straight line from beginning to end, and while there are moments in the film that might be counted as surprises, the plot never truly twists in a way that redefines itself.

The directorial style, too, is more grounded. The images onscreen are still immaculate, but they’re not tinged with the same wizzbang whimsy that has defined Tarantino in the past.

This is Tarantino stripped bare.

And it’s all to a purpose. It’s easy to draw comparisons between The Hateful Eight and Tarantino’s previous film Django Unchained, because they’re both westerns that deal heavily with the problem of slavery in America, but in some ways the two films couldn’t be more different. Django Unchained saw Tarantino trying to craft a new and better history, one in which the black man rose up against his white oppressors and rode off happily into the sunset, but The Hateful Eight paints a far bleaker picture.

If the violence seems more brutal here than in Tarantino’s previous work, it is only because it has lost its sense of play. This is not violence playing homage to Tarantino’s favorite films, but rather violence that reflects the brutality of the world.

There are no heroes in this tale. John Ruth beats his helpless prisoner without hesitation (an act that elicited a disturbing number of laughs in the theater I was in). Major Warren is just as bitter and spiteful as the Confederates he meets along the way. He lies and manipulates those around him, and justifies himself at every turn.

He wraps his lies around him like a blanket. And there are blankets everywhere in The Hateful Eight: the blanket of snow on the ground, white and cold, obscuring the harsh landscape beneath; the quilts and skins used to keep away the cold; blankets covering the evidence of the misdeeds of the past; blankets denied to a freezing enemy. Comforting. Covering. Concealing. The blankets are all lies.

The Hateful Eight is a bleak picture of a cold world filled with rotten men. Their trust is fleeting, their truces self-serving, and if they manage to put aside their differences it is only unite in common hatred against another.