“Breathtakingly beautiful and with little spoken dialogue, Matthew Barney’s film is a western that reaches for the cosmic.”—Glenn Kenny, New York Times
From the boundlessly fertile imagination of Matthew Barney, creator of the epic Cremaster cycle, comes a new visionary film rich in iconography and rooted in lore. The characters communicate a mythological narrative through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.
Redoubt loosely adapts the classical myth of Diana, goddess of the hunt and of nature, and Actaeon, a hunter who trespasses on her privacy and is punished. Both protector of the natural world and a predatory within it, Redoubt’s Diana (Anette Wacher) is a present-day sharpshooter hunting game in the Idaho wilderness.
Barney plays an engraver who happens upon the hunting outfit in the forest and begins do document their actions on a series of copper engravings. Diana takes his observation as an affront and it creates tension between the two.
The title Redoubt can refer to both a provisional military fortification, and a defensive, isolated psychological position–both evoked by the film’s setting in a vast Idaho wilderness. 2019, U.S., DCP, 134 minutes. Recommended for 16+