Overview: Academy Award® winner Nicolas Cage (1996, Best Actor, Leaving Las Vegas) stars in a gritty story about buffalo hunters in the Old West. Will Andrews (Fred Hechinger) has left Harvard to find adventure.

He teams up with Miller (Cage), a mysterious frontiersman offering an unprecedented number of buffalo pelts in a secluded valley. Their crew must survive an arduous journey where the harsh elements will test everyone’s resolve, leaving their sanity on a knife’s edge.

Blu-ray Verdict: The end credits of Butcher’s Crossing inform us that the American bison population was hunted down from 60 million in 1860, to fewer than 300 by 1880. Madness. This film is a visually-stunning, impeccably-acted, slow-burn descent into madness.

I do love a good cinematic descent into madness, as evidenced by my adoration for the films of Werner Herzog. I couldn’t help but notice Herzog’s name listed amongst the 100+ names in the Special Thanks section of the credits; he was surely an inspiration on this one, trust me!

I also adore Nicolas Cage, who again demonstrates his incredible talent and range as a actor in a role that calls for him to lose his mind, but not to go over-the top with it. It’s a mesmerizing performance, reminiscent in a way of Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, The Wrath of God, if I may extend the Herzog comparisons.

Earlier this year, The Old Way was noted as Nicolas Cage’s first Western, but Butcher’s Crossing came out before that on the festival circuit, and now that I’ve finally had a chance to see it on this glorious Blu-ray, it’s most definitely a Western, and a much less clichéd, more artful one too. Furthermore, Nicolas Cage’s real first Western is one that I wouldn’t hesitate to rank as one of the top Western films of the 21st century.

In truth, this may be a difficult film to watch for some people, given the mass slaughter and butchering of buffalo depicted in the film, which all looks perfectly real. While this film does not feature the boilerplate No animals were harmed disclaimer in the end credits, it is noted that all buffalo were handled by the Blackfeet Tribe Buffalo Program, an admirable Native-run conservation group that invited the filmmakers onto their land to tell this story.

While I’m sort of assuming we aren’t actually watching buffalo be killed, it is clear that the Blackfeet Tribe hunt a small number of animals each year in the sustainable way of their ancestors, and presumably some of the scenes of animals being skinned are real. I would love to know more about how some of these scenes were achieved, because some of it is quite grim.

Nonetheless, this is a movie I would recommend to animal lovers, given its portrayal of the evil of the buffalo hunt, and its admirable conservationist messaging.

In closing, it could be said that the central characters lacked a defining narrative, but that’s not hugely important here. I think this film was much more about mood and capturing the futility of exploiting a commodity until there is nothing left, not because it must be done but simply because it can be done.