A case that The Revenant (2015) is misread as an adventure film when it's actually a landscape film.

Iñárritu and Emmanuel Lubezki shot The Revenant using only natural light, in actual wilderness locations, in near-freezing conditions. The production was notoriously difficult. What it produced was something that no controlled production could have achieved: images of the natural world that have a physical reality that studio work cannot replicate.

The revenge narrative is thin and Iñárritu has been candid about that. But the revenge narrative is not what the film is about. The film is about the experience of being a body in a hostile landscape — cold, hungry, injured, desperate. The camera stays at ground level. The horizon is always above us. We are inside the landscape looking up.

The bear attack is the scene that people discuss, and it's extraordinary. But the scene I return to is the one where Glass is simply lying on the ground and you hear the wind and the trees and you feel the temperature and there is nothing heroic happening. He is surviving. The landscape is indifferent. That indifference is the film's argument.