“What if we were men?” The last utterance of Daniel Barber‘s female-led The Keeping Room is very much in line with the film’s desire to flip 19th century farmland femininity on its head. I won’t spoil the context of that statement with any more information but it wouldn’t hurt to keep the phrase front and center while watching the film because in many ways the Civil War-era thriller is about that very philosophical metamorphosis. Barber’s film feels Kafkaesque in terms of its characters transformation, here from female to “male” rather than human to bug. Whatever that parallel may imply.

The film written by Julia Hart opens with a curious quote from the infamous General William Sherman (he of the marching variety), “In war, brutality is good because it makes the war end quickly”. Hart’s script soon reflects back that selfsame brutality that Sherman heralded. In keeping with the General’s warped mantra, Barber’s film opens brutally. A black dog growls at a humming black woman. Erupting from a carriage, a white woman frantically flees before being gunned down unceremoniously. Shot in the back. Our likely slave barely has time to turn before she herself finds a bullet entrenched in her skull. The carriage driver, also a black man, is soon set aflame (offscreen) and his carriage rides a roaring conflagration down a long dirty road. The violence is not shocking (this is 2015) but its unblinking simplicity, as if it were not a thing out of the norm, and the starkness of gun fire against the calm, flat Southern scenery immediately recalls the imagery of author Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy, in all his novels, details a similarly desperate human fallacy: the willingness to brutalize. Barber’s film looks at this in an altogether different lens. As a subdued, tense Civil War Western, The Keeping Room subverts the often female-deprived genre by pitting a trio of (semi-)capable ladies against a pair of soldiers on the hunt for spoils of war. Thick with unease and occasionally marked by grotesque violence, Barber pits the sexes against one another in simple, fashion.

By drops his audience into the thick America’s most haunting past and allows the charmless hardship of the 1865 South to become a character unto itself, Barber gives his setting a voice of its own. Cinematographer Martin Ruhe is able to cull some awesome imagery from the barren lands, giving life to the land upon which revolution was born. The score from Martin Phipps is equally transportative, shrieking in moments of tension and whispering during lulls (of which The Keeping Room has plenty.)

In it, Augusta (Brit Marling) is left to take care of her younger sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) when their male family members are called away to war. The duo are joined by presumable house slave Mad (Muna Otaru) as they attempt to keep the family’s plot in upkeep while their men are off warring. When Louise is bitten by an animal, Augusta must make her way into town to attempt to secure medicine and winds up instead securing the attention of two Union soldiers, Moses (Sam Worthington) and Henry (Kyle Soller). This composition is striking in its reversal of the normative assessment of Confederates vs. Union parties. Here Lincoln’s Union is the enemy and we are to root for those characters with obvious Confederate roots.

Strong performances abound from the tight cast of five. Hart’s script explores the relationship these women had with each other as well as their social status that seems based on race. When hardship strikes though, color washes away. A potent scene has Augusta striking Mad and Mad striking back. Augusta’s realization that “We’re all niggers now” reminds of John Lennon’s soulful ballad ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World.’

As Sherman’s march strikes further south, tension mounts, climaxes and fades. Where the last act should have been an explosion of feminist violence, the raging fires die down to a soft fizzle. The dangerous world around them – where a raccoon bite is just as deadly as drunken, horny men with guns – still percolates with meaning but is snuffed out by the imposing ennui. When The Keeping Room should kick into fifth gear, it slows to a halt and moves in reverse. Interest wanes as the minutes wear on. The events become procedural, predictable and conclusively banal. Both the final shot and last line are a good finishing push for meaning but they come too late and too light on their feet to rescue the fallacies of the third act.

CONCLUSION: ‘The Keeping Room’ is an uncommon Western that puts the women of the frontier front and center, and though it features strong performances across the board, the film feels limited by its restraint. Though atmospheric and often tense, it’s ultimately a slow build to an only partially satisfying payoff.