One of the problems with Westerns at this point is that it’s hard to watch them without seeing other Westerns. You notice the plots and the characters you’ve seen before, and log the variations. You wait to see how much they depart from the canon and keep a running gauge of where they land on the spectrum between reverent and radical. And you watch with arms folded, hoping that they’ll find some way to surprise you—ideally, in a good way.

An arrow through the hand is a pretty good eye-opener. While it doesn’t thwok home until maybe 15 minutes into the run time of Slow West (available via VOD, Amazon, and iTunes), it solidifies the hints of droll absurdity rookie writer/director John McLean has sprinkled across the reels.

The basics here are familiar: a young greenhorn (Kodi Smit-McPhee) meets a laconic gunslinger (Michael Fassbender). The former is searching the remote West for his true love; the latter’s motives are opaque. But as they ride along toward the inevitable violent complications, McLean throws a brief encounter with a trio of Congolese musicians across their path. As the duo’s long mosey continues, the seemingly kindly steal and the murderous stay their hands. When gunmen hide in the nearest cover for miles, what do you do? If your first answer is, “Burn it down,” then you are attuned to McLean’s extra-dry, inky-dark wit.

Being so consistently wrong-footed by a movie is a rare pleasure, as is watching the indispensable Ben Mendelsohn parade around in a shaggy mountain of a fur coat that does half his work for him. But despite the efforts of the estimable Smit-McPhee and Fassbender, neither of their characters ever quite snap into focus—Fassbender’s performance could have benefitted from even one longish shot that rested on his face long enough to register an internal change.

And another thing that also came up in another recent not-quite-all-the-way-there Western, The Homesman: Who’s story is this? That’s Creative Writing 101, and you can fart around and tease all you want, but you have to decide. McLean punts.

In the end, Slow West settles on that aforementioned spectrum in the same range as John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean—an old-fashioned Western with a new-fashioned attitude that subverts Western myths as it celebrates them. Slow West is worth a watch, but it could have been a killer.