In 19th-century Patagonia, the beautiful teenage daughter of an itinerant Danish engineer (Viggo Mortensen) vanishes into the desert to elope with an Argentine soldier. Her father set outs to find her with a horse, a saber, and a pistol, but any John Ford instinct (save the girl, conquer the foreign land) is almost instantly thwarted by cultural, spatial, and even temporal confusion. Such is the quote-unquote plot of this very slowly paced, yet enticing absurdist Western. It is a gorgeous film, with its old-fashioned, unorthodox aspect ratio (nearly a square, but with rounder corners) and desolate-yet-sumptuous landscape photography, and Mortensen exhibits magnetic movie-star charisma even when he is just silently ambling across steppelike plains. It is a slightly maddening experience, too. People resistant to the film's wavelength will be driven up the wall by how self-assured and even self-satisfied it is in its art-with-a-capital-A detached whimsicality. But if one can jive to this brand of inscrutable, parched psychedelia and become lost alongside the protagonist in this foreboding and ravishing place, it is not an unrewarding journey.

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