The English: Emily Blunt excels in a bloody saga of frontier life

BBC2’s “magnificent blood-soaked tale of the Old West” features a “bravura” performance by Emily Blunt, said Nick Clark in the London Evening Standard. She plays Lady Cornelia Locke, who arrives in Maryland in 1890 in search of the man who caused her son’s death, and teams up with Native American Eli Whipp (the “riveting” Chaske Spencer), an ex-US army scout.

Together they undertake an epic journey that pits them against a series of rogues, leading to violence that is at times “bloody and visceral”.

The stellar cast includes Ciarán Hinds, Stephen Rea and Toby Jones; and the cinematography is “stunning”. Tackling big themes such as the bloodshed underpinning America’s creation story, it’s thought-provoking, and drags you “ever deeper into its heart of darkness”.

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This “operatic” tale is halfway to being a masterpiece, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. It contains moments of extraordinary beauty and ugliness, and some wonderful performances, such as Rafe Spall’s “overblown” yet terrifying villain. What lets it down is dialogue that is often impossible to make out, and hard-to-follow subplots.

The plotting is convoluted, agreed Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, but that’s more than compensated for by the parade of characters who encapsulate the pitilessness of frontier life. Blunt and Spencer excel as “lost and harrowed souls” whose relationship becomes deeper in a way that transcends romance, while writer-director Hugo Blick’s script is “as spare and gorgeous as the landscape”.