As Kit Harington continues his valiant effort to distance himself from the career-igniting role that was Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow, we currently find him pairing up with the wonderful and largely underappreciated Scoot McNairy in this dark, noirish and typically minimalist crime thriller, Blood For Dust. 

Director Rod Blackhurst is probably best known for his 2016 Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary Amanda Knox, but he has been equally involved in films of the fictional variety including 2017 sci-fi flick, Here Alone. Now, for his latest outing Blackhurst has opted to drill down into the more nuanced, understated, but indelibly violent world of gangs, guns and drugs channeling the spirit of the Coen brothers, Taylor Sheridan’s pre-Yellowstone, Hell or High Water and even Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan. Tapping into the philosophy that any crime film is fundamentally a Western at heart, this is a neo-noir cat and mouse set in the world of the mob but located in frontier territory with the combination of the surrounding Rocky Mountains and extensive, unending pseudo-barren landscape making an excellent backdrop for the sense of tension that builds throughout the film.

There’s nothing especially original about the premise of Blood for Dust, but that’s not a criticism as such - it’s just that the characters and the story have a familiarity about them. Here, McNairy plays Cliff a travelling salesman with a sticky past, which naturally comes back to haunt him as he becomes increasingly desperate in his search for work. At a point where very few options are left open to him, he ends up hooking up with an old acquaintance - the manic Ricky played with some relish by Harrington and who shares in Cliff’s past. With Ricky in cahoots with the mob, the two become entangled in an operation to transport guns and drugs across state as they look to make a quick buck. Predictably, things go horribly awry and the pair find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into this inscrutable world of violence and brutality.

Despite having essentially seen it all before, this is a great little film that ticks all the right boxes for anyone looking for a tense Saturday night thriller. The narrative bumps along at quite a pace, there’s no lulls here, and it is greatly enhanced by both sparing direction and murky cinematography. It’s also in laden with some great performances. Harrington’s slightly-crazed and erratic Ricky is highly entertaining, but the star of the show is the ever-endearing and in this case mentally-torn McNairy who you will find popping up all over your streaming services – True Detective, Fargo, Narcos – and on the big screen most recently in Night Bitch and as Woody Guthrie in Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. As always, he manages to bring something of his own to the well-worn role of desperate father and husband. There’s also some great support that helps keep things moving along nicely, not least from the wonderful Stephen Dorff whose turn in True Detective 3 was a revelation. I would have welcomed more screen time – but it was a great little cameo. Oh, and Josh Lucas does a pretty good job as the Mafia man too.

Well-paced, brutal and full of twists and turns, Blood For Dust pulls no punches and all in all is a rather decent addition to the ever-growing canon of low-key midwestern American thrillers.