Here is a 40-years-on rerelease of William Friedkin’s treasured personal project: his 1977 movie Sorcerer. It’s a study of an existential ordeal, and a reworking of Clouzot’s classic film The Wages of Fear, though avowedly drawing directly on the 1950 source novel by Georges Arnaud. (It’s a story that incidentally still seems to fascinate film-makers: Ben Wheatley is reportedly pondering a remake of his own.)

Sorcerer is a distinctive, gritty and gloomy movie – a determined slow-burner, resisting the traditional structure of narrative and central character. It involves four guys in four desperate situations, each introduced in leisurely vignettes: New Jersey mobster Scanlon (Roy Scheider), crooked Parisian businessman Manzon (Bruno Cremer), Mexican hitman Nilo (Francisco Rabal) and Middle Eastern terrorist Kassem (played by the Moroccan actor Amidou). For individual reasons, they all need to disappear and lie low for a while. Scanlon’s backstory section is a superbly suspenseful heist scene in which he robs a church during a marriage ceremony. This grimly brutal sequence is in some ways the most effective thing in the film.

The four men fetch up in a godforsaken, flyblown oil-drilling encampment in South America where everyone has a reason to avoid talking about their past, but there is not much to do but drink and go half mad with boredom. One wryly says that the barman, Carlos, is “an ex-Reichsmarschall. Right, Carlos?” A catastrophic well fire breaks out and it can only be capped with the nitroglycerin which the corrupt and incompetent oil company has stored incorrectly far from the site. Handled roughly, it could blow sky high. Now the firm needs a group of guys greedy or desperate enough to accept its offer of a large sum to drive the nitroglycerin to the fire in a couple of flatbed trucks, through terrifying terrain. Very slowly and very carefully. Our quartet take the challenge and it becomes a nightmare worthy of Werner Herzog.

For me, this is a film which fully comes into its own in the final stretch, when some of the explosives are cleverly used to clear a path in the jungle with a homemade time-delay device. Scanlon’s final psychological breakdown in the strange wasteland – shot in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin wilderness in New Mexico – is gripping, as is the final, awful twist. There’s a very Conradian moment when one driver asks a local tribesman which of the two roads lead to the village of Poza Rica. “Poza Rica is dead,” replies the old man dismissively: a strange and terrible omen. A fierce, austere and intriguing film: a cinematic concerto of pessimism.