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Who would have thought that Jacques Audiard , the French director of slow-burn, humanistic character studies would one day take on one of the most characteristically American of genres, the Western, with his English-language debut? While worlds apart from his socially realist “ Dheepan ” and “Rust and Bone,” Audiard’s “The Sisters Brothers” sports a similarly closely watched, leaned in sensitivity with its brotherly story. Adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel (by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain ) and infused with sweetness, graphic body horror (that, at times, spins a childlike icky humor) and a high body count, this alcohol-soaked Frontier road trip constantly reinvents itself at every turn in fun, witty and ultimately touching ways. Call it a revisionist or an absurdist Western if you will, but Audiard’s film feels both refreshingly new (without ever going to the extreme lengths the Zellner Brothers did with “ Damsel ”) and nostalgically familiar.

The backdrop is the Gold Rush, which is said to have made a Sherriff’s job much easier: if there’s trouble, you follow the gold to get to the source of the unrest. But when we meet the central brothers Eli ( John C. Reilly , goofy, soulful and great at physical comedy as ever) and Charlie ( Joaquin Phoenix , quietly enigmatic) one random dark night at the start of the film, there doesn’t seem to be any wealth to be pursued. With the playful last name “Sisters,” the pair of cold-blooded hit-men, without much thought about the consequences of their actions, murder a household of people in a tightly orchestrated set piece of nocturnal shootouts. The reason remains unknown—with this job and everything else, the ruthless duo answers to a much feared, mostly unseen mysterious crime boss called ‘The Commodore’ and habitually assassinates their way through the 1850s Oregon. Along the way, they bond and trivially bicker about life as casually as they kill.

But just when the soft-edged Eli starts contemplating his future and ongoing profession despite the unaffected heavy drinker Charlie’s shrugs, The Commodore sets them up for a new task. They will tail and kill a criminal called Hermann Kemit Warm ( Riz Ahmed , cheekily mysterious) for reasons we would slowly piece together later—for now, he is just a thieving enemy who once betrayed their boss. Enter Morris ( Jake Gyllenhaal , reuniting with Ahmed after “ Nightcrawler ”), a British-accented bounty hunter for hire, tasked with delivering Warm to the brothers. But then the prospect of immediate wealth turns tables for everyone involved—the brainy chemist Warm’s creamy invention that makes gold glaringly appear in water, redefines priorities at once. The two pairs, traced on parallel storylines for a while (that admittedly slows down the film’s previously absorbing rhythm), find themselves entangled in a ploy against each other. Along the way, local madams, kindly prostitutes, further the accidentally amusing events and some dead horses unfortunately enter the story, sharpening the film’s tone as an original yet studied homage to its genre.

A delightful tale of familial ties balanced well with a slick cat-and-mouse yarn, “The Sisters Brothers” owes much of its breezy charm to John C. Reilly, whose comic timing does wonders for the meatiest and most multifaceted character of the ensemble. Phoenix feels right at home in Charlie's quieter shoes, while Gyllenhaal’s familiarly on-edge persona and a mischievous turn from Ahmed impress. Reilly and Phoenix demonstrate tremendous chemistry throughout—we buy both their longtime amity and occasional callousness, especially when the script drip-feeds the brothers’ back-story into the narrative. In this bittersweet tale with a sentimental heart, and among a dangerous milieu of blood, greed and spiders (one in particular that causes the film’s biggest gross-out moment), Audiard’s characteristically sensitive touch gradually lifts familial emotions, letting them linger in the air long after the credits roll. 

This review was originally filed from the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9th.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Film credits.

The Sisters Brothers (2018)

Rated R for violence including disturbing images, language, and some sexual content.

121 minutes

John C. Reilly as Eli Sisters

Joaquin Phoenix as Charlie Sisters

Jake Gyllenhaal as John Morris

Riz Ahmed as Hermann Kermit Warm

Rutger Hauer as Commodore

Carol Kane as Mrs. Sisters

• Jacques Audiard

Writer (based on the book by)

• Patrick Dewitt
• Thomas Bidegain

Cinematographer

• Benoît Debie
• Juliette Welfling
• Alexandre Desplat

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Review: Blood Is Never Simple in ‘The Sisters Brothers’

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By Manohla Dargis

• Sept. 20, 2018

The first time you see Eli and Charlie Sisters, they are raining down death in the night. It’s 1851, somewhere in the Oregon Territory, and the sky is as black as a bottomless well. Voices and gunfire puncture the gloom as Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) descend, entering a cabin and shooting dead one man after another. By the time the ground is littered with corpses, a nearby barn has caught fire and so has a stable of unfortunate horses. We sure messed that up, Eli ruefully observes as the uneasy antiheroes of “The Sisters Brothers” are swallowed up by darkness.

The French director Jacques Audiard (“ A Prophet ”), making his English-language debut, grabs you quickly in a busily plotted movie that tracks the Sisters as they pursue others. They work for the Commodore (a foreboding Rutger Hauer), an enigmatic kingpin with an apparently limitless number of enemies for Eli and Charlie to hunt down. The sly, smiley Charlie is the Commodore’s favorite and perhaps the movie’s, too, just because killing comes naturally to him. The brothers have an appetite for destruction, but only Eli gets indigestion. Delicately played by Mr. Reilly, who opens up his character one emotion at a time, Eli is a seeming conundrum; he’s also the movie’s ace in the hole.

Westerns were made for bloodshed, and “The Sisters Brothers” delivers as expected. After some fussing and narrative table setting — the Commodore makes Charlie the lead man on their next assignment, creating some jokey sibling jostling — the movie settles back down to its deadly business. The brothers are to meet John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), a detective the Commodore has hired to track down Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed). It’s unclear what the Commodore wants with Hermann and whether he’s been aggrieved or robbed. Like the audience, Eli has been left in the dark about some details, a shared ignorance that hints where our sympathies should land.

The mission, as Charlie likes to call the hunt, grows tricky. Adapted for the screen by Mr. Audiard and Thomas Bidegain from the novel by Patrick deWitt , the narrative soon forks. As Charlie and Eli gallop toward gold-rushing California (the movie was shot in Spain and Romania), the story begins to regularly switch over to John and Hermann, who meet in a frontier settlement. John, a gentleman graced with one of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s mysterious accents, has been tracking Hermann but not nearly stealthily enough. Hermann reaches his hand out to John, having assumed that he might have found a kindred spirit, someone with whom he can speak and commune.

Hermann guesses right. He and John rapidly join forces, and Eli and Charlie are now pursuing two quarries, not one. Each set of men seems to represent starkly different worlds, as if they were emissaries from civilization and its discontents. John and Hermann speak in soft, measured voices made for drawing-room deliberations. They have stories that emerge vaguely, having gone West like so many others. Western natives, Eli and Charlie behave and speak roughly, their exchanges laced with profanity. The vulgarities never reach the poetically baroque excesses of the HBO show “ Deadwood ,” but they are vivid enough to put distance between them and genre exemplars like John Wayne.

Despite Mr. Audiard’s embrace of contemporary norms that would have been out of place in a Wayne western — the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood — he isn’t attempting to rewrite genre in “The Sisters Brothers,” which is one of this movie’s virtues, along with its terrific actors and his sensitive direction of them. Certainly, it doesn’t come across as a self-conscious revisionist western, an often meaningless category that implies that genres remain static or, worse, that latter-day westerns are more complex than earlier ones. Tell it to John Ford, whose career spanned much of the 20th century and whose westerns varied accordingly.

For much of the movie, Mr. Audiard instead seems content to play with genre tropes. He lingers on its mud and its blood, making each glisten. He slips in an occasional iris shot and liquid slow motion, and folds in ideas about brotherhood, masculinity and the catastrophic, perhaps unpayable debt exacted by a violent past. Eli and Charlie’s pursuit gives the movie urgency and visual appeal as open vistas give way to snowy mountains, the dirty streets of San Francisco and a wilderness that prospectors are rapidly spoiling. The brothers also visit a saloon where Charlie gets drunk while Eli hires a prostitute ( Allison Tolman ), but this is no movie for women, who just embroider its edges.

In time, Eli and Charlie catch up with John and Hermann, leading to the most sustained pleasurable interlude. A great deal of the movie’s enjoyment comes from its four principals, who work well when paired off but are particularly appealing in a group. After expediently bonding in a gunfight, the four characters settle into a little bit of paradise and an easy camaraderie that suggests what kind of world they could build together. For a while, Charlie, an often voluble, charismatic psychopath, even quiets down, allowing the men to drink, laugh and think about the Utopia that John and Hermann hope to build. They want to build it in Dallas, a dream of a future that is as absurd as it is tragically doomed.

The Sisters Brothers Rated R for sustained gun violence and a seriously gruesome medical procedure. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute.

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‘the sisters brothers’: film review | venice 2018.

John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed star in 'The Sisters Brothers,' French director Jacques Audiard's first English-language effort.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The jovially titled The Sisters Brothers would have felt very much at home among the gorgeous, idiosyncratic revisionist Westerns of the early 1970s. What this will mean to audiences 45 years on is another question. This first English-language outing by the ever-adventurous French director Jacques Audiard ( A Prophet , Rust and Bone ) is a connoisseur’s delight, as it’s boisterously acted and detailed down to its last bit of shirt stitching. A sterling cast, led by John C. Reilly in the sort of starring role he’s been waiting for his whole career, will give this a certain profile in specialized release and down the line in home viewing venues.

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As are many classic Westerns, this is a tale of pursuit and patience involving a long journey and threats known and unknown. There will also be blood, of course, vast changes of fortune and the decisive matters of chance, daring and luck.

Release date: Sep 21, 2018

The Sisters Brothers possesses all of the above, in addition to the curiosity of a filmmaker who has clearly taken great relish in exploring a country that is both familiar (via countless movies) and now quite distant.

For the genre faithful, it’s almost always rewarding to see the classic form being tackled by an interested outsider. Audiard, working from the well regarded 2011 novel by Canadian author Patrick deWitt, keeps things interesting all the way by virtue of his clear desire to make everything here feel built from scratch. Much as with such 1970s Western refreshers as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Hired Hand and  Bad Company, you can feel the filmmaker’s zeal to make contact with the real Old West through the obligatory mythic passageway provided by the cinema. These films never drew a substantial public, and the same will likely be true again here, even as there are many pleasures to be had.

As with most Westerns, the story is simple: A big shot named The Commodor (Rutger Hauer) wants a foreign outsider prospector by the name of Hermann Kermit Warm ( Riz Ahmed ) to be killed for stealing. To this end he engages a brother assassin act by the unlikely name of Eli and Charlie Sisters (Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix ).

Alert to the danger, Warm takes on protection in the form of lawman/detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhal), setting off a pursuit of untold miles and time. This set-up naturally provides excuses to cover vast tracts of unspoiled land, just what any Western needs, as the tale moves from heavily wooded Oregon down along the California coast to San Francisco in high Gold Rush dudgeon.

The two parties are a study in contrasts. Warm is something seemingly new in Westerns, a Middle Eastern prospector, a dentist by profession, while Gyllenhaal’s lawman is unusually eloquent, perhaps a victim of over-education. The Sisters boys are of a notably lower status, rougher and gruffer but not without a rollicking appeal.

The film works up an only moderate sense of momentum over the first hour at least, with the greatest pleasures emanating from the variety of landscapes (Spanish and Romanian locations pass impressively as the Far West) and the feints and jabs of the four men, both in the direction of opponents and one another. Unlike many Westerns of yore, these are not men of few words; they’re idiosyncratic, even highly articulate at times, which goes hand in hand with the invigorating stores of intelligence with which the writers have endowed the four men.

It’s hard to tell how long the pursuit goes on, but at the film’s halfway point the Sisters arrive at the Pacific (reminding at one point of the unforgettable Oceanside interlude in One-Eyed Jacks ), and shortly thereafter at San Francisco, in the instant splendor and madness of its Gold Rush heyday. “This place is Babylon,” one of the brothers exclaims, as they indulge in a fancy hotel and get a load of flush toilets and gold-trimmed restaurants.

It’s during this spell by the Bay that the Sisters, and the film, take a fateful turn, as Eli proposes ditching the Commodore, thinking they can do better on their own. “We have a chance to get out,” he insists to his unconvinced brother, creating a rift that leads the tale to its inevitable rendezvous with violence. What eventually comes to pass is both unsettling and, finally, quite satisfying.

Reilly has the most expansive character here and he makes it his own, breathing deep stores of boisterous life into him. Phoenix provides a willing, if less assertive younger brother accomplice who is obliged by birth to be a second banana, while Gyllenhal and Ahmed are attractive, but rather less attention-grabbing saddlemates.

Physically, the film is a fine specimen, with production designer Michel Barthelemy and costume designer Milena Canonero providing unusually rich and detailed contributions. Alexandre Desplat’s score is icing on the cake.

Venue: Venice Film Festival

Opens: September 21 (U.S.) Annapurna

Production: Annapurna, Page 114, Why Not Productions, Michael De Luca Productions

Cast: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal , Riz Ahmed, Rutger Hauer

Director: Jacques Audiard

Screenwriters: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, based on the novel by Patrick deWitt

Producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Gregoire Sorlat, Michel Merkt, Megan Ellison, Michael De Luca, Alison Dickey, John C. Reilly

Executive producers: Chelsea Barnard, Tudor Reu, Sammy Scher

Director of photography: Benoit Debie

Production designer: Michel Barthelemy

Costume designer: Milena Canonero

Editor: Juliette Welfing

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Casting: Francine Maisler, Cristel Baras, Mathilde Snodgrass

121 minutes

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The Sisters Brothers review: New western is a reassuringly old-fashioned affair

Jacques audiard’s film remains engaging thanks to its exceptional central performances from john c reilly and joaquin phoenix , article bookmarked.

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Director Jacques Audiard, 122 mins, starring: John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Allison Tolman. Cert 15

Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers follows in a long tradition of European-made westerns. It has a primarily American cast, a French director and was shot in Spain. Its producers include everyone from its star, John C Reilly , to Belgian arthouse auteurs, the Dardenne brothers. In spite of its mongrel background, this is a reassuringly old-fashioned affair. Audiard isn’t trying to reinvent the western or to use it to make telling points about today’s society or how America has lost its way. Instead, in adapting Patrick deWitt’s Booker Prize-nominated novel for the screen, he is paying affectionate homage to a genre he clearly admires. There is plenty of humour and philosophising here but the basic ingredients aren’t that different to those found in the films of Raoul Walsh or John Ford.

Reilly’s performance as Eli Sisters, the older of the two brothers, is similar to his Oliver Hardy in the recent Stan & Ollie . He is a superb comic actor who knows just how to switch between humour and pathos. In one beautifully staged scene, we see Eli here fast asleep by the campfire as a spider crawls over his face. His mouth is wide open and so we know exactly where the spider is headed. Reilly also extracts maximum comic capital out of the scenes involving his discovery of one of the great new inventions of the modern age, namely the toothbrush.

Eli’s partner is his brother, Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix), who drinks far too much and gets terrible hangovers which cause him to vomit or fall off his horse. Eli and Charlie are quite the comic double act – or would be, if it wasn’t for their line of work. They’re killers for hire.

Audiard gives the film an elegiac feel that the brothers’ clowning does nothing to dissipate. Like hired guns in most westerns, the Sisters brothers have a very fatalistic approach to life. Eli may talk about retiring and opening up a store but Charlie realises that such a notion is completely fanciful given the trail of violence the brothers have left behind them. They’ve killed so many people they half expect retribution will soon be coming their way. Every victim has a father or brother who wants vengeance. If the brothers double cross their mysterious employer, “The Commodore”, other killers will be put on their trail.

The 20 best westerns of all time

The film begins in brutal and murky fashion with a night-time shootout that takes place in the pitch dark. It is hard to make out what is going on until suddenly the landscape is illuminated by a horse covered in flames galloping across the plains. (A barn has caught fire.) Both brothers are ruthless. They have no qualms about killing men already wounded and begging for mercy.

Although the body count is very high, Audiard doesn’t trivialise the violence. When someone is shot, we’ll hear a sickening sound as the bullet knocks the victim backwards.

The film is set in the early 1850s, at the height of Gold Rush fever. The Commodore has sent Eli and Charlie in pursuit of a chemist/prospector called Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who appears to have discovered a failsafe formula for detecting gold. Warm is also being pursued by a very dapper detective, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), who keeps a diary, likes to quote Thoreau and is prey to existential despair. (He feels his life is like “an empty cylinder”.) The idea is to catch Warm, torture him and get the secret of his formula from him.

Most of the characters here come from troubled families. Eli and Charlie have the “foul blood” of their violent, drunken father running through their veins. Morris is likewise tormented by memories of childhood trauma. Very few women feature in the film, and those who do appear are strictly stock types: the saloon bar madam, the sweet-natured prostitute or the kindly old mother.

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The chemist Warm turns out to be an idealist who dreams of using his formula not to get rich himself but to finance a utopian community. We know, though, that this is only a pipe dream.

As the Sisters brothers ride for days on end in pursuit of Warm, the film turns into a shaggy dog story. Events seem increasingly haphazard. One moment a bear will turn up; another, murderous varmints wearing racoon hats will emerge from the bushes. This may reflect the inchoate and violent nature of life in the old west but it doesn’t make for smooth storytelling. Audiard is more interested in exploring the relationship between the brothers than in trying to stoke up suspense. The humour can seem incongruous when it is seen next to so much bloodshed and darkness. There is something perverse in the way the filmmakers try to make us identify with characters who are, in fact, homicidal killers.

It’s a measure of the four exceptional central performances (from Reilly, Phoenix, Gyllenhaal and Ahmed) that the film remains so engaging in spite of its narrative digressions and moments of very bleak violence. Audiard serves up just what audiences would expect in a tale from the wild frontier – wagon trains, rugged landscapes, galloping horses, decadent saloon bars and plenty of shootouts. Alongside the action, the director also shows us his characters’ inner lives. In doing so, he proves again that the western is far more durable and flexible as a genre than sceptics would have us believe.

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Film Review: ‘The Sisters Brothers’

Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly are sibling troubleshooters in a Western ramble that's witty and watchable yet still a touch wearying.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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The staggering lack of gender parity in this year’s Venice Film Festival competition slate — a grand total of 21 films, only one of which was directed by a woman — has produced a pledge, on the part of the festival, to correct that situation in the future. That’s a good start, yet it’s worth pondering why the numbers were so egregiously off in the first place. The most obvious question to ask is: Could every film that wound up in the competition really have been “better” than every last film, directed by a woman, that was submitted and rejected? Like many observers, I overwhelmingly suspect that the answer is no.

I thought of this, in light of the competition line-up, when I saw “ The Sisters Brothers ,” a violent Western picaresque that rambles and rough-rides like some quirky horse opera from the ’70s — but since it no longer is the ’70s, it plays a lot slower. The movie, which is one of the 21 competition films, stars Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly as the Sisters brothers, notorious sibling outlaws who work for an Oregon City mobster known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer, who is seen only from a distance and has no lines).

The brothers are his hitmen, trouble-shooting fixers, and thugs of all trades. Eli Sisters (Reilly) is the older and more responsible of the two, and also the more fretful, while Charlie Sisters (Phoenix) is a drunk who carries an attitude of jovial recklessness. The two take the piss out of each other on a daily basis but also work together like a well-oiled six-gun. They’re heartlessly efficient killers who can drop into any situation, and after firing away — the gun shots on the soundtrack are notably blasty and intense — will always leave a trail of corpses.

The movie traces the gradual unraveling of Eli and Charlie’s sibling-killer act after the Commodore gives them a routine assignment. A man named Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed) has run out on a debt; he’s being pursued by a detective ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) who’s contracted to deliver him to the brothers. Hermann, a would-be prospector with a background in chemistry, has invented a formula that’s pure gold: an acidic liquid that, when poured into a river, will light up any gold rocks in it. The brothers are supposed to retrieve Hermann, torture him until he gives up the formula, then kill him. But along the way, the detective, played by Gyllenhaal as a friendly dandy who speaks in a ridiculously cultivated accent, winds up bonding with Hermann, and the two decide to become business partners.

Riz Ahmed plays Hermann with his usual commanding snap, and we want to see him succeed. Yet “The Sisters Brothers” has a rough-and-tumble absurdist cynicism about it. It keeps dragging its characters down, sort of the way the Coen brothers might, though with more ferocity and less style. There’s a lot of grueling hardship on display. A large spider crawls into Eli’s gullet while he’s sleeping, causing him to get sick, and the brothers take major punches at each other (Charlie compares Eli’s left hook to being whacked with a shovel). When they finally catch up to Hermann and Gyllenhaal’s John Morris, they’re beaten down enough to join forces with them — which seems like it might be a slightly lazy sentimental turn, and is, until you see what happens when too much of Hermann’s chemical formula gets poured into a river. It is not pretty.

“The Sisters Brothers” is too light to be a true drama and too heavy to be a comedy. It’s that timeless movie thing, a lark , and on that level it works just fine. But it’s a lark that plods on more than it takes wing. It’s a movie that makes even its own glimmer of originality feel slightly musty. Nothing wrong with that. But it does get you wondering if there’s another film that might have brought the Venice competition more adventure.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Competition), Sept. 2, 2018. Running time: 120 MIN.

• Production: An Annapurna Pictures release of a Why Not Productions, Annapurna Pictures, Page 114 Productions, KNM, Michael De Luca Productions, Top Drawer Entertainment, France 2 Cinéma, France 3 Cinéma, UGC, Apache Films, Mobra Films, Les Films du Fleuve production. Producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Michael De Luca, Alison Dickey, Megan Ellison, Michel Merkt, Cristian Mungiu, John C. Reilly, Grégoire Sorlat, Executive producers: Chelsea Barnard, Tudor Reu, Sammy Scher.
• Crew: Director: Jacques Audiard. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain. Camera (color, widescreen): Benoît Debie. Editor: Juliette Welfling. Music: Alexandre Desplat.
• With: Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rebecca Root, Rutger Hauer, Carol Kane.

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‘The Sisters Brothers’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly Star in the Most Sensitive Western Ever Made — Venice

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“ The Sisters Brothers ” is a sensitive western about brotherly love that just happens to revolve around stone-cold murderers. It’s a context that requires an original approach to the genre, and that’s exactly what veteran French director Jacques Audiard brings to his first English-language effort. However, in retrospect, Audiard is a natural fit: With movies like “Dheepan” and “A Prophet,” Audiard makes rich character studies about people trying to do the right thing in a world stacked against them, and nothing in American mythology provides a better template for exploring that crisis than the Wild West. However, it’s the stirring chemistry between Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly as committed siblings that transforms these lively, violent circumstances into a sweet and intimate journey designed to catch acolytes of the genre off-guard.

Based on Patrick Dewitt’s 2011 novel, “The Sisters Brothers” unfolds against the backdrop of the Gold Rush, though the historical context is secondary to the narrative it sets in motion. In the first frame, titular Sisters brothers Charlie (Phoenix) and Eli (Reilly) emerge from nighttime shadows to massacre an entire house full of targets. Employed by an enigmatic gangster known as The Commodore (Rutger Hauer, in a fleeting but welcome cameo), the brothers careen across the barren landscape juggling various missions to murder men for reasons irrelevant to their plight. It’s a subversive adventure story about the supposed bad guys, a hit-man comedy by way of Peckinpah, and remarkable for the way it makes the familiar backdrop so appealing from the start.

For the hard-drinking Charlie, this endless killing spree is a justification unto itself; the gentler Eli, however, has started to question the underlying purpose of their missions. Little by little, the focused script (credited to Audiard and Thomas Bidegan) reveals details about this odd pair and the history of their bloody career path; so long as the movie hovers in the center of this dynamic, it remains a fascinating exploration of an unusual family bond.

“The Sisters Brothers” mines so much substance out its central characters that it falters when it cuts away from them. When the brothers are hired to track down a supposed thief named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed, wearing a classy mustache and an inviting grin), the story shifts to his experiences with Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), the bounty hunter who nabs Hermann under the auspices of delivering him to the killers. Sporting a peculiar British accent that makes his lopsided “Okja” character look normal, Gyllenhaal stands out as odd variable in this otherwise credible scenario, though his scenes with Hermann develop their own sense of intrigue. It turns out the alleged criminal actually has a water-based formula with the ability to make gold appear in river beds, and its financial prospects appeal to Morris enough that he decides to become his prisoner’s business partner as they plot to foil the Sisters brothers when they arrive.

But really, this scenario sets in motion more complications for the brothers to escape, as they continue to contend with the broader existential question of what they should do with their time. Enduring harsh conditions on the road between Oregon and California, the Sisters spend much of the movie saving each other from physical harm, whether it’s abrasive spider bites or drunken saloon showdowns, and it’s so endearing to watch them survive each new twist that it renders broader stakes irrelevant. There’s an Altmanesque quality to the way Audiard builds out this world, with the ever-reliable Alexandre Desplat’s jangly score and Benoit Debie’s warm, painterly visuals opening up the brothers’ journeys to the boundless possibilities of the frontier. It almost seems as though they could keep at it forever, but every messy gunfight inches them closer to the possibility that time is running out.

About those gunfights: While Audiard has never made a proper action movie, many of his credits have a brutal, physical intensity, from the grotesque prison showdowns of “A Prophet” to the street brawls of “Rust and Bone” and the Rambo-like militant finale of “Dheepan,” from which Audiard drew on “The Wild Bunch.” To that end, he excels at constructing the most intense sequences of the movie. Filled with jolting sound design and clever misdirection, the shootouts in “The Sisters Brothers” have a sustained potency and remain unpredictable until the very last moments, much like the brothers themselves.

Reilly, who also produced the movie, tends to strike a distinctive tone between goofball and gentleman, a balance that makes his character here so likable from the outset. In a standout moment at a brothel, he attempts to engage in the most kindhearted sexual role-playing in film history, and his bedroom antics are so lovable the prostitute (“Fargo” Season 1 star Allison Tolman) is led to tears; next door, of course, an inebriated Eli’s wrecking havoc on cue. The sad-funny balance of this sequence epitomizes the movie’s endearing tone.

Phoenix, buried behind his usual scrappy beard, peers out at every twist with the same wild eyes that have become his trademark. A sort of companion piece to his emo hitman in Lynn Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here” earlier this year, Phoenix plays Eli as the ultimate foil to his brother’s measured world view: Whereas Charlie constantly worries about his behavior, Eli never hesitates to maintain control of a situation — in a scene that finds the brothers facing down the barrels of a few guns at once, a typically sloshed Eli stares back at their foes and confidently vomits before taking them out.

While not every turn of events remains so involving, the siblings remain a key selling point, as the title of “The Sisters Brothers” provides a template for examining one of its core themes: This most masculine of genres often takes masculinity for granted, but “The Sisters Brothers” doesn’t let its tough guys off the hook. They’re vivid, emotional beings, the products of troubled upbringings who live hand-to-mouth the only way they know how. When they finally come around to confronting a major figure from their past, it arrives as a kind of spiritual awakening, the cinematic equivalent of watching a grown man cry.

“The Sisters Brothers” premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. Annapurna Pictures releases it theatrically on September 21.

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The Sisters Brothers Reviews

Despite its shaky tone, some of the humor lands really well. And it’s a lot of fun watching such an eclectic cast bite into this fascinating assortment of characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 25, 2022

With memorable performances throughout this extraordinary cast, The Sisters Brothers is another Audiard film whose tonality withstands categorization. It's neither a straightforward Western nor merely revisionist.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2022

A loose, funny, thoughtful and near-surreal western.

Full Review | Jan 28, 2022

Episode 15: The West Was Red

Full Review | Original Score: 76/100 | Sep 1, 2021

Plays like a movie that yearns to say something without knowing what it would like to say

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 5, 2021

It's a buddy flick and a Western but it's also more than the sum of its parts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 1, 2021

An absorbing character study that alternates its carnage with a poignancy that borders on poetic.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 7, 2020

Daring itself to be different and welcomed by some outstanding performances from its four leads, it's not destined to change the world, but you won't regret watching it either.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 27, 2020

Audiard gives the whole movie a very bizarre feel, crafting a western that feels at once a part of the genre and something entirely different.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 16, 2020

By sprinkling a variance of ideas and emotions across a plane far and wide, [Audiard] ends up with a film of ambition and patience that works more often than it doesn't.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 25, 2020

For a movie clocking in at a shade over two hours, The Sisters Brothers drags too long before giving a reason to care about the characters' repetitive struggles.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jul 18, 2020

Audiard, in his first English-speaking film, runs a western that stands out, almost always, using the genre's parameters with measure. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 27, 2020

Neither a nostalgic throwback to traditional westerns nor a revisionist antiwestern, this advances a positive view of camaraderie between individualist western types while subtly critiquing the unfettered capitalist system in which they operate.

Full Review | Mar 4, 2020

An uneven tone robs the film of a bit of momentum and coherence, but the lead performances and Audiard's proven visual skill mean it never falls out of the saddle.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

A film that you want to love. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 70/100 | Dec 20, 2019

Overall, The Sisters Brothers offers great performances amid an intriguing premise. Along with its beautiful cinematography, it is a surprise of a Western.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 7, 2019

By turns intense, hilarious and casually contemplative, it draws you in on the promise of simple thrills then wins you over with a sophisticated, all-around surprising ride.

Full Review | Oct 23, 2019

If this is Audiard's first major foray into stateside filmmaking, one can only hope it won't be his last.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 17, 2019

[The Sisters Brothers] balance menace with charm.

Full Review | Jul 9, 2019

Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are gun-slinging ruffians for hire in French director Jacques Audiard's frolicky tilt at the American Wild West.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 23, 2019

‘The Sisters Brothers’ Review: Guns, Gold and Greed in the Wild, Warped West

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

The title seems like a joke: How the hell did Charlie Sisters ( Joaquin Phoenix ) and his older brother Eli ( John C. Reilly ) grow up in the Old West with a last name like Sisters and not get ragged on to the point of madness? It’s 1851, and the siblings work as ruthless hired guns ever-ready to kill for profit on the orders of their boss, the mostly unseen Commodore (Rutger Hauer). Conflict escalates when their overlord sends them after Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed, terrific), a mild-mannered, Middle-Eastern chemist who has invented a magic elixir that, when poured on river rocks, will highlight any gold nuggets found within the stones. The Commodore wants the Sisters to torture the formula out of Hermann and then slaughter him. Eli has qualms; Charlie doesn’t. The boss has sent along an advance man in the person of lawman John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) to deliver Warm to the two men.

Got that? What raises the bar is the presence of Jacques Audiard in the director’s chair. A French auteur, known for such humanist dramas as A Prophet, Rust and Bone and D eephan, Audiard is making his first film in English — and it’s a western. So don’t expect him to saddle up and retrace every horse opera that’s come before. Working from a script he wrote with Thomas Bidegain from the 2011 novel by Patrick deWitt, the filmmaker brings an outsider’s view to the genre, one that throws his movie off in the best possible way. Audiard recently won the Silver Lion as Best Director at the Venice Film Festival. Watch The Sisters Brothers and you’ll have no trouble understanding why.

You expect the movie to look good and thanks to director of photography Benoit Debie, it exceeds those expectations. The story moves from the mountains of Oregon down along the California coast to San Francisco where the Gold Rush is in full swing. (It was actually shot in Spain and Romania, but who’s complaining?) For Audiard, character trumps plot at every turn. He takes the time to show the wonder in the eyes of Charlie and Eli just to see a toilet that flushes. Phoenix and Reilly dig into their juicy roles with relish, with Reilly stealing the show as the big brother who touchingly imagines a quieter, more settled life than wasting varmints. Phoenix, blending mirth and menace to just the right degree, plays Charlie as a drunk who sees no sense in settling down. And Gyllenhaal has a ball playing Morris like a walking dictionary who enunciates every syllable. It’s not that Audiard lowers the violence level: There are shootouts and bloodletting at every turn. More crucially, he wants audiences to know these men, inside and out, so we give a damn about what happens to them.

No spoilers, but the lure of gold diverts each man from his stated goals. The Sisters Brothers may strike short attention spans as too pokey for its own good. But Audiard, referencing such classics as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, sculpts his own unique vision, and it’s a knockout. There’s greed, for sure, and a vein of dark comedy that the film mines with rollicking gusto. Still, it’s the dream of the Old West that this warped Western strives to convey in all its many facets. It’s one of a kind.

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The Sisters Brothers Review: An Offbeat Take on the Western

John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix shine as gunslinger siblings in the unorthodox oater of The Sisters Brothers.

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The term “revisionist” gets thrown around a lot in film criticism, especially when it comes to genres like the Western, but in the case of The Sisters Brothers , the description certainly applies. Directed and co-written (with Thomas Bidegain) by the French filmmaker Jacques Audiard–best known for searing world cinema films like A Prophet and Dheepan — The Sisters Brothers takes the traditional Western template and then veers unexpectedly, humorously and humanely away from it, creating both a funny buddy comedy and a brutal character-driven drama within the same occasionally shaggy framework.

Based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt, there’s little pioneering spirit or old-time black-and-white morality apparent in The Sisters Brothers . Audiard’s Old West is a crude, filthy, mean and often barbaric place, a vast wilderness marked by scattered pockets of, if not civilization, at least the semblance of a society or community. It’s on a symbolic representation of this wasteland–an empty plain on which sits one lonely, tiny ranch–that we meet Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C. Reilly and future Joker Joaquin Phoenix), siblings who are also deadly hired assassins.

We first encounter them at the end of a job, which Audiard films from a distance: we never see the violence up close, but we see the bursts of gunfire that flash out from the ranch and the Sisters’ weapons like distant strokes of lightning against the dark sky. There are screams and finally a fire (including the haunting image of a running horse, flames rippling out from its body). The one immediate notion we come away with is that the Sisters are damn good at their job, although Audiard never glorifies the brothers’ considerable skills and shows the violence in all its ugliness.

What the director seems most interested in is getting into the psyches of these two men, who are vastly different in many ways but united by blood both inside and out. Eli is the more thoughtful of the two, a man who we soon realize has had enough of the Sisters’ nomadic, amoral lifestyle and wants to find a new direction in life. Charlie is not quite there yet: dissolute, often drunk, he revels in whoring, fighting and killing as if he knows that it will all eventually catch up with him one way or another.

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The bones of a narrative are put in place when the Sisters are hired by their regular employer, the Commodore (a briefly seen Rutger Hauer), to find and kill Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed, soon to be seen in Venom ), an idealistic inventor who has discovered a new chemical formula through which prospectors can detect gold. A detective named John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), sent by the Commodore previously to retrieve Warm, has been seduced by the man’s confidence, passion and dreams of building a Utopian society down in Texas with the riches they’ll presumably acquire from Warm’s formula. Now the Sisters are tasked with dispatching both men and bringing the formula back.

But The Sisters Brothers is not as concerned with Warm’s MacGuffin-like discovery as it is with subverting the structure that it sets up. Nominally built as a chase (and shot in epic fashion by cinematographer Benoit Debie in the film’s one deliberate nod to a genre hallmark), the movie takes a long, leisurely, meandering course on its way to the resolution of the story, focusing instead on the evolving characters of its four leads.

Reilly is impeccable and soulful as Eli, pulled by his sense of responsibility to both his brother and his job but knowing that he wants to experience a different life and perhaps even love. Phoenix is also excellent as Charlie, tamping down the heavy existential dread of some of his recent roles while subtly portraying the younger brother’s gradual transition toward Eli’s way of thinking. The series of tangents and mini-adventures the two encounter on their journey–from a bizarre accident with a spider to a confrontation with the creepy bordello owner Mayfield (Rebecca Root)–highlight the near-unbreakable bond between the two even as their goals become increasingly divergent.

further reading: The Must See Movies of 2018

Ahmed, with his large eyes and disarmingly candid way of speaking, provides a core of grace and gives a warmly open performance. Gyllenhaal’s character is perhaps the murkiest in terms of his development and saddled with a strange accent that veers toward British and then hairpins back toward a sort of upper class affectation, neither of which is quite successful. The movie spends a bit too much time with this pair–balancing their principled quest against the more prosaic and ruthless one of the Sisters–but their storyline finally finds its footing when Morris and Warm inevitably meet up with the Sisters.

That meeting doesn’t go quite as one might expect, and neither does just about all of the last third of The Sisters Brothers . The kind of plot developments one might expect from a standard Western never quite materialize, and in some cases are actively turned on their heads. But ultimately, all four men are changed forever by the strange manner in which they are brought together, and the film reveals that what Audiard is most interested in–as with much of his earlier work–is the ways in which damaged, hardened or cynical men can at least be introduced the possibility of change. The epilogue provides a final, eloquent coda to this most unusual and fascinating of Westerns.

The Sisters Brothers is out in theaters today.

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Don Kaye is a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist and associate editor of Den of Geek. Other current and past outlets include Syfy, United Stations Radio Networks, Fandango, MSN, RollingStone.com and many more. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @donkaye

Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

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Movie Review: The Sisters Brothers (2018)

• Howard Schumann
• Movie Reviews
• No responses
• --> September 24, 2018

“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home” — John Howard Payne

The Smothers Brothers they are not. Brothers Eli (John C. Reilly, “ Kong: Skull Island ”) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix, “ You Were Never Really Here ”) Sisters, known to all as the Sisters Brothers, are deadly serious. Hired assassins who prowl the Old West looking for their prey, they operate at the behest of a mysterious figure known only as “The Commodore” (Rutger Hauer, “ The Mill and the Cross ”) and go about their tasks with keen precision. Winner of the Silver Lion award for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, Jacques Audiard’s (“ Dheepan ”) first English-language film The Sisters Brothers is a Western that has more on its mind than Cowboys and Indians. Though it has its share of violence, there is nothing of John Wayne in the film and, may I add, probably very little of the real West.

Written by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain (“ Rust and Bone ”), the film is set in the Oregon Territory in 1851 during Gold Rush days. Based on Patrick DeWitt’s novel of the same name, the film features the love/hate relationship between two siblings, the volatile and alcoholic Charlie and his more responsible brother Eli, also a killer but with a soft(er) side. While Phoenix does his usual workman like job, Reilly is the real standout in his first lead role, showing a gritty determination with a side of humor and a touch of melancholy.

The film opens with a barrage of gunfire as the two men raid a farm in the middle of the night. Their target is one man but there are six dead bodies at the end, prompting Eli to tell Charlie that we messed that one up pretty good (though he did not use that precise terminology). Always ready to stick it to his brother, Charlie declares that he will be the “lead man” on their next assignment. The brothers are far from incompetent, however, and have a reputation for being a two-pronged killing machine whose interests lie no farther than getting the job done. In their next assignment, the brothers are dispatched to track down, torture, and kill Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed, “ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ”), a chemist and prospector whose invention of a device that is alleged to make gold sparkle and rise to the surface of a lake or river is coveted by the Commodore.

Enhanced by a delightful score by Alexandre Desplat (“ Isle of Dogs ”), the brothers ride their horses over gorgeous Western vistas shot by cinematographer Benoît Debie, (“ Spring Breakers ”), though it was actually filmed in Spain and Romania. Capturing Warm, however, has been left to John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal, “ Stronger ”), an incongruously elegant detective who proceeds to strike up a friendship with the articulate prospector that saves him from torture and death at the hands of the Sisters. Although their friendship may be primarily about a business partnership, Warm entrances Morris with his talk of a utopian community in Texas where everyone is equal, there is no crime or violence and presumably, like in the Norwegian folk song Oleanna, “the cows all like to milk themselves and the hens lay eggs ten times a day.”

Bickering most of the time and leaving a few dead bodies along the way, the Sisters find their way to California and eventually San Francisco where Eli becomes enamored with such modern inventions as flush toilets and toothbrushes, perhaps a signal that their way of life is coming to an end. Eventually meeting up with Morris and Warm, they try their luck at prospecting until greed, as it often does, gets in the way. Eli talks of quitting the life and returning to domesticity, perhaps opening a store with Charlie, but he will have none of it, saying that he has never known any other way of life and wants to keep doing what he’s doing.

The Sisters Brothers takes place in a Western atmosphere we are unfamiliar with. The two men are not one-dimensional gunslingers and opportunists but real people who exhibit a degree of self-reflection. As the film progresses, a transformation occurs that lifts the film to another level. After a poisonous spider finds its way into Eli’s mouth, Charlie is forced to care for him and the brothers bond in a gentler, more caring way. Though The Sisters Brothers attempts to attain a balance between action/adventure and dark comedy, its message of human connection and the longing for a more just society strikes a responsive chord in an age overflowing with cynicism.

Tagged: assassin , brothers , friendship , novel adaptation , violence

I am a retired father of two living with my wife in Vancouver, B.C. who has had a lifelong interest in the arts.

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The Sisters Brothers review – John C Reilly excels in revisionist western

I n gold rush-era Oregon, bickering bounty hunters Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix respectively) pursue the chemist Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), accompanied by detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal, overenunciating to an embarrassing degree). Based on Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel , French director Jacques Audiard’s English-language debut is a revisionist western. Images of the Oregon trail’s deserted beauty invoke the genre’s cinematic history, but these aren’t John Ford’s stoic, taciturn cowboys. Instead, they’re foul-mouthed and self-destructive (drunkard Charlie), sensitive (the soft-hearted Eli), even idealistic (would-be socialist Hermann).

Reilly is particularly good here, browbeaten tenderness leaking, for example, into a role-play scene at a whorehouse. The film’s sometimes tiresome sense of humour is laddish in its embrace of viscera (blood, boils, vomit and live spiders all feature), but as the narrative trots (or, rather, plods) along, its men are revealed to be endearingly less so.

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• John C Reilly
• Joaquin Phoenix
• Jake Gyllenhaal

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The Sisters Brothers Review

01 Apr 2019

The Sisters Brothers

Step aside, The Man With No Name, for here come The Men With Silly Names. At first glance the Sisters Brothers, aka Eli ( John C. Reilly ) and Charlie ( Joaquin Phoenix ), are tough, fleabitten prairie assassins, as fearsome as Clint Eastwood ’s iconic, laconic anti-hero. But the more time you spend with them, the more you realise that this pair of firearm-packing fortysomethings are actually childish, bickering improvisers who rarely know what they’re doing, nor why they’re doing it. Undercutting established Western tropes, they’re a hoot to spend time with. And the same is true of the film in which they appear. Sometimes violent, often hilarious, and always unpredictable, Jacques Audiard ’s dark Western is a terrific yarn about two uncivilised men grappling with the onset of civilisation.

Working for a shadowy figure known only as the Commodore ( Rutger Hauer ), the pair are hot on the trail of a man named Hermann Kermit Warm ( Riz Ahmed ), who is carrying an invention he claims is capable of locating gold. But this is the loosest of thrillers, unhurriedly tossing the shambling brothers into one colourful scenario after another. One situation ends with Eli puking up baby spiders; another with one of them watching as a flaming horse gallops past. This West is wild, no doubt about it, and brutal, and surreal, but Audiard paints it with an amused eye, constantly puncturing the puffed-up posturings of the tough guys who inhabit it. Often restlessly moving his cameras, rather than employing grand, locked-off, John Fordian compositions, Audiard (the French director of such dark, spiky dramas as Rust And Bone and A Prophet ) keeps things feeling vital and authentically grubby. It’s anti-mythmaking, of which John Wayne would surely disapprove.

Gives a fresh jolt of electricity to the Old American West.

Wry as the whole thing may be, the two titular characters slowly win your heart. As the sensitive, prickly, blabbery Eli, Reilly (who was the main force in getting Patrick deWitt’s source novel turned into a film) is tremendous, bringing to life a sweet soul who pines for the girl he left behind (“It’s a shawl!” Eli scowls when his brother refers to the fragranced item he carries everywhere as a “silly red scarf”). Watching him get to grips with a toothbrush, a miraculous new invention in mid-19th century America, is like watching Homo erectus sizing up fire. Phoenix, meanwhile, has a rare twinkle in his eye as hard-drinking, slightly mad Charlie. Other than the times when the character is blearily napping atop his moving horse, Phoenix hasn’t been this spry on film for years. And their interplay is delightfully pugnacious, making it all the more remarkable that this is Audiard’s very first English-language film.

As it trundles along, and the bodycount inexorably rises, it develops into a four-hander. Ahmed is fascinating as the movie’s smartest character, a man who dreams of a utopian society and thinks he knows how to achieve it. And Jake Gyllenhaal (who, let us not forget, began his acting career with a less intense Western, City Slickers ) provides a different vibe, as an intense prospector with his own ties to the Commodore, who’s also on the trail of Warm.

But if you think events are heading towards a traditional main-street shoot-’em-up between the oddball quartet, think again. The third act is full of wonderful weirdness and strange diversions. Much like last year’s The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs (which featured its own gold-mad prospector, in the craggy form of Tom Waits), The Sisters Brothers gives a fresh jolt of electricity to the Old American West. Not bad for a film based on a Canadian book, shot by a French director, in Spain.

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• DVD & Streaming

The Sisters Brothers

• Drama , Western

Content Caution

In Theaters

• September 28, 2018
• John C. Reilly as Eli Sisters; Joaquin Phoenix as Charlie Sisters; Jake Gyllenhaal as John Morris; Riz Ahmed as Hermann Kermit Warm; Rebecca Root as Mayfield

Home Release Date

• February 5, 2019
• Jacques Audiard

Distributor

• Annapurna Pictures

Movie Review

Pull up a chair by the stove, you thar young whelp. Let me tell ye ’bout a madness that swept over the whole country ’round abouts 1849. They called it gold fever, and that blasted metal sent plenty a man out of his dadburned mind.

They’d leave behind jobs and families, sure as shootin’—rushin’ from all over tarnation to the gold hills of Californ-i-ay. Not that them hills were yella, mind. Them prospectors shoveled plenty of brown before they ever laid sight on a glint, and that’s if they saw it at all. They sunk their fortunes in picks and pans, and what did most of ’em get? A big tin of nothin’, that’s what!

But all them prospectors, they had needs of their own to fill. That’s where the real fortunes were made. Yessir. Mercantiles and saloons, houses of God and houses of ill-repute (if y’take my meaning) all sprung up ’round those gold camps. And then y’had them wheeler-dealers, who didn’t know a lick about gold but knew a lot about men and money, and t’weren’t above using one to make t’other. And when a deal went south, well, them thar fee-nan-ciers sometimes needed a few roughnecks to collect.

The Sisters brothers were two such hombres. Old West assassins, they were, and mostly they made a living by killin’. And they really were brothers by the name a’ Sisters : Charlie was the younger ‘un, but he was surely the leader, too—a hand at deals and cards, lethal with the ladies, and with his own trusty gun, a’ course. Killed more men than the plague, I’d reckon. Drank too much, though. T’was a little off his nut, if y’ask me.

Eli was the older, more normal one. Yeah, he rode with his brother, and he sure didn’t hesitate when the lead started flyin’. Still, always got the feelin’ that Eli’d just as well settle down with a good woman. Raise a few cattle, maybe a few kids.

But that warn’t Eli’s lot. He and Charlie worked for a rich, suit-wearing tycoon called the Commodore. Don’t know what his real name was. Couldn’t say anyone did, ‘cept maybe his kids, if’n he had any. The Sisters brothers did the Commodore’s dirty work: Commodore’d point, and those boys lept, guns out and fingers on the trigger.

But then one day, ’bout 1851, the Commodore sends ’em on a different kind of job: joining up with a city detective name of John Morris, to track down another man, Hermann Kermit Warm. Seems Warm has something the Commodore wants—a chemical formula that, rumor has it, can set gold in a river to glowin’ . No need to pan for hours or days for just a few flakes: Just pick them glowin’ rocks off the river bottom and get rich.

Did Warm steal the formula from the Commodore? Well, the old coot seems a little uncertain on that par-ticular point, but it don’t matter. Not to Morris, anyhow. And certainly not to the Sisters brothers. Only gold they give one whisker’s flick about is the shiny stuff that comes out of the Commodore’s own pockets.

‘Less they catch the fever themselves, that is.

Positive Elements

Except for Eli’s rather bloody occupation, the elder Sister brother seems like a nice enough chap. Indeed, we learn that Eli got into their profession mainly to keep an eye on his more volatile brother. “I had to help him,” Eli explains. “He’s my brother.”

Alas, Eli’s influence has its limits: Charlie still gets drunk and shoots up more than his fair share of saloons. But Eli does what he can. He seems to retain more of his basic human decency, too, considering the brothers’ nasty line of work.

When Eli’s horse is injured by a bear, for example, he cares for and dotes the animal: One gets the feeling that Eli would willingly carry the horse on his back, if it came to that. And when he hires a prostitute for some companionship, Eli seems far more concerned with recalling his lady love back home—and replaying a touching moment of goodbye—than satisfying a carnal lust. The woman leaves before anything physical happens. She’s so deeply touched by Eli’s care, telling him, “You’re just very kind and gentle, and I’m not used to it.” (Which speaks volumes about the sort of treatment she probably is used to.)

Neither Eli nor Morris seem too keen on torturing the secret chemical formula out of Mr. Warm, so they’ve got that going for them. And toward the end, it seems that all four develop something akin to a shared, very unlikely friendship.

Spiritual Elements

We see a church now and again in the background. Someone wears a cross.

Sexual Content

Charlie spends part of an evening with several ladies of said evening. The brothel he’s in is filled with other men and women: We see glimpses of female nudity (including partial views of breasts) and some sexual movements before the camera finally finds Charlie surrounded by mostly unclad women.

Eli carries a red shawl, apparently given to him by a lady friend back home. He folds and unfolds it, and he sometimes smells it, hoping to catch a whiff of his would-be girlfriend. A scene later on implies masturbation. When Eli hires a prostitute to pretend to be his far-away lover, he kisses her.

The brothers eventually come to a town called Mayfield, named after its proprietor—an apparent woman dressed in standard saloon-type garb. The brothers show surprise that a woman runs the town—or perhaps detect that Mayfield is, in fact, a man dressed up as a woman. (Though there’s no obvious reference to Mayfield being a transsexual, the character is played by Rebecca Root, a transsexual actor.)

We see both Charlie and Eli shirtless now and then.

Violent Content

The Sisters brothers are killers by profession, and we see them at work plenty.

More than a dozen men fall before their gunfire, the reports of the firearms sounding seat-rattlingly explosive here. Often after a shootout, the brothers will walk through the battleground, shooting the dead or dying again in the head (often accompanied by sprays of blood), just to be sure. The camera doesn’t linger long on the corpses as a rule, but it does make a couple of exceptions: In one case, the dead body sprawls in front of an open safe, blood pouring out of an open wound and pooling around the female victim’s head.

Someone falls from a roof. Charlie shoots a bear: We don’t see the kill, but do see the bear’s corpse, as well as the damage the bear did to Eli’s horse. (The animal’s face has been deeply gouged, and the obviously infected injury gets more grotesque as the journey wears on.) Someone dies of natural causes. Someone punches a corpse in the face twice—again, just to make sure he’s really dead. (The actual blows are just off camera.) We see the lifeless, mangled body of a horse. The brothers punch each other, and they nearly get into a massive fight at a restaurant. Other people are slugged, too. Someone’s knocked out cold.

When Warm realizes that he’s being chased, he surmises—correctly, most likely—that he’ll be tortured, and he tells someone in graphic detail what will likely be done to him. In flashback, we see the brothers’ father in a nightmarish silhouette, hacking what we first assume to be firewood. But soon, we realize that he’s actually stacking a pile of bloody arms. (We later learn that Charlie killed his father. “I’m the older one,” Eli said. “It should’ve been me,” suggesting that their violent dad had it coming.)

[ Spoiler Warning ] Warm’s gold-detecting concoction is highly toxic, requiring lots of washing to keep it from eating through its users’ skin. Warm’s own legs bear some of the painful-looking wounds from the last time he employed it. Someone later spills the chemical, seriously burning himself and two others. All of them bear terribly painful, horrific-looking burns. One succumbs to those wounds. Another gets someone to bring him a gun so that he can kill himself. (He’s successful: We only hear the gunshot, but afterward, we see the blood and gore form an almost-frozen fountain on the ground.) Still another has his arm sawed off by a doctor. We see part of that gruesome operation—perhaps the most jarring imagery in this frequently violent film—and hear more of it as we watch the doctor labor with a bone saw.

Crude or Profane Language

More than 25 f-words and nearly 10 s-words. We also hear more minor profanities such as “a–,” “b–ch” and “d–n.” God’s name is misused at least eight times, seven of those with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused three times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Charlie drinks a lot, and often to excess. Practically the first sentence out of his mouth after a movie-opening gunfight is, “Let’s go get a drink.” When Eli hears gunfire during an otherwise quiet night, he looks out and sees people fleeing the local saloon, with Charlie staggering out, challenging someone—anyone—to draw on him. The next day, Eli practically has to tie Charlie upright on his horse as they attempt to ride out of town.

When Charlie’s surrounded by prostitutes one night, it looks like he’s been drinking then, too. The two brothers drink wine at a fancy dinner, and Eli suggests that he’s a little tired of protecting Charlie from his own worst impulses.

Those impulses have their root in the Sisters’ father, by the way: We learn that he drank excessively, too. Charlie suggests the same “poison” is in both of them (meaning, perhaps, both the yearning for alcohol and/or the streak of insanity his father displayed; the brothers seem to question where the drinking ended and the madness began, or whether the madness was the drinking).

Charlie and others smoke cigarettes and cigars occasionally, too. We see Charlie rolling his own cigarettes as well.

Other Negative Elements

Charlie vomits after a drunken night. Eli swallows an apparently poisonous spider in his sleep (which we see creepily crawl into Eli’s mouth). When he wakes up, his whole body is swollen, and he spends the next few days dealing with the poison, including chills and fever. We learn that Morris had a difficult relationship with his father. Eli marvels at a flushing toilet. We see people gamble (and fight when someone’s suspected of cheating).

Many a Western has suggested that gold fever is a malady of the worst sort, prone to drive a man mad. Even real gold is ultimately fool’s gold, these films suggest—a dream that promises the world but leaves its pursuers empty in the end.

“I know what gold does to men’s souls,” says an old-timer named Curtain in the classic Western Treasure of the Sierra Madre .

The Sisters Brothers , for all its violence and excess, offers an interesting bend in that take: The souls here have already been twisted and corrupted. Here, gold holds the promise of redemption, of a better world. For some, that “better world” is a real, stick-in-the-ground place, an imagined utopian community where like-minded people can work toward the betterment of themselves and others. Others believe that gold can help them extricate themselves from the rough, violent lives they now live.

And some don’t care about the gold one whit. They just want to keep on killing.

“Unlike you, brother,” Charlie sniffs, “I’m proud of what we do.”

And so we feel the movie’s tension between the violent, glamorous Old West—embodied by the hard-drinking, straight-shooting Charlie—and the “better world” imagined by Eli, a guy who longs for his sweetie back home. The guy who just wants to open a store and settle down. A guy who buys a toothbrush , for heaven’s sake.

But here’s the funny thing about movies: Even as The Sisters Brothers lauds Eli’s desire for a more peaceful, more civilized future, it revels in the violence and excess we’d associate with Charlie. After all, who’s gonna see a movie about a quiet guy who owns a store and brushes his teeth? No, this film is all about these iron-toting Old West assassins, gunning down whoever might get in their way.

And as this movie suggests, gold ain’t the only thing that can do bad things to our souls.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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“The Sisters Brothers” Is Not Your Average Western

By Anthony Lane

What is it with Jacques Audiard and amputation? The heroine of “ Rust and Bone ” (2012) spent much of the movie without her legs, having been lunched on by a killer whale. Now we have “ The Sisters Brothers ,” in which an important character mislays an arm—a manageable loss, except that the film is a Western, and the limb used to come in handy whenever a gun needed slinging. Who’s afraid of a one-armed cowboy?

The story, based on Patrick deWitt’s novel of the same name, begins in 1851, at the fulcrum of the nineteenth century. The action sets off in Oregon and heads south, often at a canter, sometimes at a more leisurely pace, even pausing for a gawk at San Francisco. The principal riders are Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix) and his brother Eli (John C. Reilly). Charlie is a hothead and a brute—the stronger partner, you’d say, were he not ravened by a weakness for booze. So heavy is one hangover that he falls off his horse. Eli is the lumbering half of the duo, less cocksure and more tempted by the thought of a well-earned retirement. The boys could not be less alike, but they can’t do without each other, and what binds them together is their job. They are paid to murder.

Their employer is known as the Commodore, whom we see only fleetingly and who is never heard to speak. This is a shame, since he’s played by Rutger Hauer. (Was the role originally meatier, perhaps, before being pared to near-nothing?) For their latest mission, Charlie and Eli must find a fellow named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who is not, as you might imagine, a Muppet but a law-abiding chemist. He is said to have “no friends, no baggage, no money,” but also to have invented a process for increasing the yield of treasure from gold-bearing rivers. The brothers are to mine the knowledge out of him, by any means necessary, and then shut him down.

First, however, the poor sap needs to be located, and so a scout, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), is sent ahead, the idea being that he will befriend the chemist, detain him, and wait. Morris is the most singular figure onscreen, and a graceful addition to Gyllenhaal’s gallery of loners, compiled in films like “ Enemy ” (2013), “ Nightcrawler ” (2014), and “ Demolition ” (2015). As an actor, he seems to be keeping something back, or clutching it tight, and such tacit withholding draws us instinctively toward him; it’s an especially good fit for this movie, which glitters with half-revealed secrets. The gold rush may have been crowded, but it was not a collective effort. As Chaplin realized, it swarmed with solitaries, all of them dreaming, like dragons, of a private hoard.

Hence the touching encounter between Morris and Warm, who turns out to be a kindred spirit, shy and unalloyed in his ideals, impossible to target or to hate. Morris decides to join him in his quest rather than set him up for slaughter, and, at this pivotal point, the loyalties in the tale begin to shift. Soon other characters follow suit, going against the grain of their own rough natures. Why do we keep faith with these fickle souls? Partly because transmutation is Audiard’s stock-in-trade. He is French, and “The Sisters Brothers” is his first film in English, but Charlie, Eli, Morris, and Warm are of a piece with the protagonist of “ A Self-Made Hero ” (1997), who pretends to have been a member of the French Resistance, and with the Tamil fighter in “ Dheepan ” (2016), who flees the civil war in Sri Lanka and ends up as a caretaker in Paris. All these people feel compelled to become other than what they were. The journey is not always a success.

But there’s another reason for the lure of “The Sisters Brothers.” If the lives that it portrays are in transit, the world that encircles them is in even faster flux. We listen to a letter written by Morris, in voice-over. “I have travelled through places that didn’t exist three months ago,” he says, before listing the signs of activity. “First tents, then houses, then shops, with women fiercely discussing the price of flour.” There’s a thrill to that specificity, but it isn’t just the floury detail of the dialogue that makes the movie rise. Look at Eli buying his first-ever toothbrush, devoutly studying the instructions, and being startled, one morning, by the sight of somebody else cleaning his teeth, in the open air. Brushfight at the O.K. Corral!

The cinematic brawl between the wild and the supposedly civilized is hardly a novel theme. When the frame of a house is lofted into position, in Audiard’s film, we are reminded of other hoistings and half-built habitations, like the skeletal church tower in “ My Darling Clementine ” (1946), which lacks both a preacher and a name. So what has changed between John Ford’s classic, all about Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his brothers, and Audiard’s approach? Well, for one thing, courtesy has shaded into comedy. Whereas Fonda, in his gentlest tones, asks a hotel clerk for buckets of hot water so that a lady can take a bath, John C. Reilly, as Eli, lets out a simple yip of delight on confronting a flush toilet. Lavatorologists will quibble (the earliest such contraptions, displayed in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851, had not yet arrived in America), but the joke holds firm, and Eli has seen a more commodious future. He pulls the chain like somebody launching a ship.

Not that the film eases up on savage behavior. “Hey, this is the Sisters Brothers!” is the first thing we hear. Echoes of “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees!,” you might think, except that Charlie and Eli aren’t just trying to be friendly. Out on the prairie, shrouded by darkness, they kill a shackful of men. From a burning barn, nearby, gallops a horse on fire. Civilized society, whatever that may be, is many leagues away, and some of the images that follow, in the next two hours, tack between the nasty and the tragic—between the sleeping Eli being bitten by a spider inside his mouth, for instance, and a night sky so deeply bruised and empurpled that we could be staring at a Rothko.

Nevertheless, even as the Commodore dispatches a fresh batch of assailants, we get an extraordinary sense, welling up in the main characters, that being felled by unnatural causes might not be the only way to die. “My life is an empty cylinder,” Morris declares, and he means to fill it. Warm, for his part, talks of a utopian community that will concentrate on true democracy and “spiritual development.” (The plan is to base it in Dallas. Hmm.) These are bewildering prospects, to say the least, for anyone appearing in—or watching—a Western. Violence should be met with violence, whether in a street gang or beside a secluded stream: that is the lesson bequeathed to generations of moviegoers, and maybe it takes a foreign director, now and then, to suggest otherwise. Ford, I suspect, would have scoffed at the ending of “The Sisters Brothers,” and so would Anthony Mann, who, at the climax of his gold-rush drama, “ The Far Country ” (1955), makes sure that the hero (James Stewart), having been shot in the arm, removes his sling for the purge of the final showdown. No such return to the fray for Audiard’s amputee; he lifts his arm to aim, but it just ain’t there. As for the film’s conclusion, I will say only that it stirred me even more than it surprised me. Once the possibilities of mayhem have been exhausted, it’s time to give peace a chance.

What is hard to work out, in regard to “Bel Canto,” is who should really have made it. Buñuel? Mel Brooks? Or would it have suited the Marx Brothers, as a coda to “A Night at the Opera”? How about a role for Steven Seagal?

The actual director is Paul Weitz, who, together with Anthony Weintraub, adapted the script from Ann Patchett’s prize-winning novel. We are in a nameless but volatile Latin-American land, at the home of the Vice-President, who is hosting the most rarefied of soirées. Many nationalities are represented, and the company includes a visiting Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe) and the French Ambassador (Christopher Lambert). The guest of honor is Roxane Coss (Julianne Moore), a famed American soprano, who has kindly consented to perform, for a sizable fee. Mid-aria, however, she is interrupted by a squad of gun-waving guerrillas. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

I was afraid that the terrorists, who are without mercy, might force Roxane to sing something by Andrew Lloyd Webber, so it comes as a relief when they merely demand the release of all political prisoners. Later, however, the diva stands on a balcony and, spurning the offer of a megaphone, serenades the watching world with a tremulous burst of Puccini. “When they hear the beauty of your voice, these government criminals, perhaps they will find a solution to our situation,” the rebel leader says. Ah, yes, cultural diplomacy; think of all the hijackings that have been brought to a bloodless end by a snatch of “La Bohème.” Meanwhile, the narrative staggers on, enlivened only by the hovering threat of kitsch and the musical dubbing. Moore, like an upmarket version of Lina Lamont, in “Singin’ in the Rain,” lip-synchs convincingly to the sound of Renée Fleming. But not quite convincingly enough. ♦

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By Richard Brody

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The sisters brothers, common sense media reviewers.

Heavy violence, camaraderie in revisionist Western.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Acknowledges the pitfalls of violence -- i.e., tha

Characters are likable but aren't worth emulating.

Lots of killing, guns, shooting. Many characters d

Brief images of men having sex with prostitutes. M

Several uses of "f--k," plus "bulls--t," "a--hole,

A main character abuses alcohol, getting extremely

Parents need to know that The Sisters Brothers is an incredibly violent Western based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt. Many characters are shot and killed -- death doesn't seem to carry much weight here -- and there's plenty of gore and blood. Animals are killed, characters get nasty chemical burns, a character…

Positive Messages

Acknowledges the pitfalls of violence -- i.e., that violence begets more violence -- but there never seems to be anything in the way of consequences other than death itself. Greed is also rampant. For a brief time, four characters work together, but it's short-lived due to vice and greed.

Positive Role Models

Characters are likable but aren't worth emulating. They're violent, greedy, selfish, sometimes disloyal.

Violence & Scariness

Lots of killing, guns, shooting. Many characters die, and death isn't given much weight. Bloody wounds, gore, pools of blood. Animals (horses, a bear, fish, beavers, etc.) are killed; horses are trapped in a burning barn (one is shown running, on fire). Characters get nasty chemical burns. Characters get sick and nearly die. Man's arm amputated with a saw. Brief, violent nightmare shows a man chopping bodies to pieces. Character dies by suicide. Hitting and punching. Characters handcuffed, tied up.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief images of men having sex with prostitutes. Men flirt with prostitutes in a bar. Sexual innuendo. Kissing. Suggestion of a man masturbating under a blanket.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "f--k," plus "bulls--t," "a--hole," "damn fool," "ass," "son of a bitch," "goddamn," plus "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A main character abuses alcohol, getting extremely drunk in more than one scene. Violent hangovers with vomiting. Lots of social drinking, mainly whiskey. Cigarette and cigar smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Sisters Brothers is an incredibly violent Western based on a novel by Patrick DeWitt. Many characters are shot and killed -- death doesn't seem to carry much weight here -- and there's plenty of gore and blood. Animals are killed, characters get nasty chemical burns, a character dies by suicide, and limbs are severed. Language is also very strong, with multiple uses of "f--k" and more. A main character abuses alcohol, gets heavily drunk in more than one scene, and suffers terrible hangovers (including vomiting and passing out). Social drinking and cigar/cigarette smoking are also shown. Expect to see brief images of sex with saloon prostitutes, as well as kissing, flirting, and the suggestion of a man masturbating under a blanket. This movie -- which stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix -- has some fine acting and picturesque scenery, and mature Western fans are likely to enjoy it, but it may be a little off-putting to genre newcomers. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (2)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 2 parent reviews

The Sisters Brothers is a must-see hidden gem from 2018

Just like the rest of the junk out ther, what's the story.

In THE SISTERS BROTHERS, it's 1851, and cool-headed Eli ( John C. Reilly ) and reckless Charlie ( Joaquin Phoenix ) Sisters are hired killers who generally work in Oregon for a powerful man called the Commodore. Their latest job involves a man named Hermann Warm ( Riz Ahmed ). Another of the Commodore's agents -- the elegant, educated John Morris ( Jake Gyllenhaal ) -- has been charged with finding and befriending Warm; then the Sisters Brothers will meet them to do the dirty work. But Morris discovers what it is that the Commodore really wants: a special chemical formula for finding gold. So Morris decides to abandon the Commodore and join Warm in business, but they make many enemies in the process. The Sisters Brothers save the pair from attackers, and the four become friends. But the chemical gold mining has its drawbacks, and more tragedy awaits.

Is It Any Good?

This enjoyable revisionist Western based on Patrick DeWitt's novel focuses on male relationships. But it's also somewhat tonally uneven, swinging from scenes of brutal violence to scenes that could be described as "cuddly." French director Jacques Audiard ( A Prophet , Rust and Bone , Dheepan ) makes his English-language debut with an assured touch; the movie's lyrical dialogue flows like music. Audiard seems to specialize in stories about the way violence wriggles its way into relationships, and The Sisters Brothers fits that mold perfectly. Reilly and Phoenix's characters have a simple but genuine history and an appealing conversational shorthand. Their performances are terrific.

The same goes for Ahmed and Gyllenhaal (who previously worked well together in Nightcrawler ), playing educated men who prize simple courtesies and kindnesses. (Gyllenhaal in particular speaks with a studied elocution that sounds poetic.) When the four characters are all together, hanging around camp and waiting for a chance to look for gold, they have a genuine, delightful camaraderie. Audiard uses the film's Western landscapes effectively, but the movie's violence can seem detached, and the killings don't mean much (except for the untimely death of a horse, which is more gruesome than it had to be). And if not for the ingenious casting of the loopy, lovable Carol Kane (who has about five minutes of screen time), the ending wouldn't have worked quite so well.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Sisters Brothers ' violence . How intense is it? Does it seem designed to shock or to thrill? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

How is drinking depicted? Is it glamorized? Where does social drinking cross the line into abuse in this movie? What are the consequences ?

How are women portrayed in the movie? Are any shown in positions of power? Why do you think prostitutes are so prominent in stories of the Old West?

What is the appeal of the Western genre? How does it speak to us today? What is a "revisionist" Western? Does this one qualify?

How are the brothers affected by an abusive childhood? Do they overcome it? How do their choices differ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 21, 2018
• On DVD or streaming : February 5, 2019
• Cast : Jake Gyllenhaal , Joaquin Phoenix , John C. Reilly
• Director : Jacques Audiard
• Studio : Annapurna Pictures
• Genre : Western
• Topics : Book Characters , Brothers and Sisters
• Run time : 121 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : violence including disturbing images, language, and some sexual content
• Last updated : September 15, 2023

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The Sisters Brothers (2018)

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Movie Review: The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers, Annapurna Pictures, 121 minutes, 2018, R

The Sisters brothers, the pair of antiheroes at the center of this film, couldn’t be more different. The elder, Eli (John C. Reilly), is thoughtful, kind and vulnerable, while the younger, Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), is hotheaded, belligerent and obscene. Together they are awfully good at what they do—killing people.

The Commodore—the man for whom the Sisters kill and who appears only from afar—is an allegorical baron of sorts who seems to have amassed both a great fortune and a great many enemies. The brothers’ latest “mission,” as Charlie passionately describes it, is to track down chemist Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), who is traveling to California with a secret formula that promises to easily extract gold from rivers. They are to kill the chemist and return with the formula.

One of the Commodore’s spies, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), has already pinpointed Warm and is keeping tabs on him until the Sister brothers arrive. But Morris, whose Latinate diction often befuddles the brothers in telegrams, finds what he considers an intellectual equal in Warm. They become friends, then business partners and together try to pull a fast one on the two killers on their tail.

The scenes with Warm and Morris, who engage in scholarly, often idealistic discussions, play nicely against the cruder poetics of the Sisters brothers. Warm proposes to build a post-capitalist, post-crime utopia…in Dallas, of all places. To do it, of course, he needs gold. All four lead actors are magnificent, and when they come together, the film soars into its own briefly sustained utopia. At times The Sisters Brothers feels like different buddy movies screening simultaneously, and it all works.

The characters—gunfighters and prospectors, wanderers and adventurers—may hold the same occupations, motivations and dreams as many a movie character before them, but they’re so richly plumbed by both script and performance that the archetypes feel born anew. The same can be said about the world that director Jacques Audiard has crafted. Despite the high prospect of death, this California, at the height of the Gold Rush in 1851, is exhilarating. Morris describes its fast-paced development in his journal: “First tents, then houses, then women fiercely discussing the price of flour…[in] places that didn’t exist three months ago.” When the Sisters brothers arrive in the bright new metropolis of San Francisco for the first time, they beam with excitement. So do we.

The Sisters Brothers is not declaratively subversive, nor is it a simple exercise in Western tropes. It tends to hop along its own trail at its own pace, often conflating commonly seen subject matter (a gunfighter challenged by another in a stable, for instance) with more unusual ones (e.g., a gunfighter challenged by the dread of using a toothbrush for the first time). The bizarre isn’t there to throw commentary onto the commonplace, nor is the commonplace meant to alleviate the audience from the bizarre; it all just seems perfectly suited to the experience of the Sisters brothers—a welcome addition to a long line of luminary Western duos.

—Louis Lalire

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