Netflix’s grippingly gory new western, American Primeval, was penned by Mark L Smith, a screenwriter whose greatest achievement to date has been to ask: what would happen if Leonardo DiCaprio was mauled by a bear? That was the question he teased out in his script for The Revenant, the brutal Leo v the American frontier drama from 2015 for which DiCaprio bagged a belated Oscar.
With American Primeval, Smith circles back to The Revenant’s depiction of the 19th-century United States as hell with mutton chops. The going is grim throughout this unflinching yet absorbing series, set in Utah in 1857 and featuring bumper quantities of scalping, hanging and throat slitting.
The intent is to hold a mirror up to the orgy of violence in which the modern US came into being. Utah turns out to have been especially blood-soaked, with Brigham Young’s Church of Latter Day Saints determined to hack out a facsimile of heaven on earth in a sullen territory already occupied by the warring Shoshone, Southern Paiute and Ute nations.
Just how much violence that process involved is made clear in the opening episode where Smith and director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) restage the Mountain Meadows Massacre in which Mormon militia and their Paiute allies butchered 120 pioneers dreaming of a new life in the virgin West. The slaughter is witnessed by Abish Pratt (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), a Mormon who sees her husband, Jacob (Dane DeHaan), scalped and is then taken prisoner by the Paiute (that she and her husband are members of the Church of Latter Days Saints is of no consequence when her wagon-train is attacked).
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As the killing unfolds, another outsider, Sara Rowell (Betty Gilpin), is seeking passage to California with her son, hoping to join her husband and leave behind a dark secret in Pennsylvania. Her only hope is Isaac (Taylor Kitsch), a gruff trail-finder man raised by the Shoshone.
Berg has insisted that American Primeval “isn’t a Western”. There are no swinging saloon doors, no heroes on horseback, no gunslingers in eye-catching ponchos. Instead, it’s all about the grime and the chaos of a new nation forged in murder and mayhem. It isn’t for the faint of heart, and the commitment to authenticity sometimes muddies the plot: there are moments when you wonder if they are piling on the misery simply for the sake of it.
But Kitsch and Gilpin are impressive as people trying to hold on to their moral compasses in a world where right and wrong have been flipped on their heads. A strong cast also includes Kim Coates (Sons of Anarchy) as the messianic Brigham Young and Jai Courtney as a relentless bounty hunter named Virgil Cutter.
Revisionist westerns have been Hollywood’s default take on cowboy lore since Sam Peckinpah in the 1970s – but seldom has the stench of American conquest risen so raw and hot. After nearly a century of movies about the nation’s birth pangs, this impressive series does the seemingly impossible by making us see the old west in a bloody new light.
