Possibly this year’s left-field arthouse sleeper hit, Northfork is the third offering to date from twin brothers Michael and Mark Polish, a pair of sibling directors whose lofty ambitions are already evident from their impressive stylistic range, as evinced by the acclaimed debut Twin Falls Idaho, a truly weird piece of work in which they starred as conjoined twins. At best, we could be looking at the next Coen brothers: at any rate, their horizons are far removed from the Hollywood hackwork of the Farrellys and Wachowskis.
Sparse, strange, surreal, portentous, meditative, and extremely unlike anything else you’ve seen this year or last, Northfork is something of an abstract noir Western, with distinct echoes of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. It’s set in 1955 in frontierland Montana, where the town of Northfork has two more days to exist before it’s flooded to facilitate the construction of a hydro-electric plant. While most of the inhabitants have packed up and gone, a few stubborn stragglers remain, and it’s the Herculean task of the Evacuation Committee, led by James Woods, to help them on their way. Meanwhile, a sickly child has been left in the care of the local priest – a truly haggard Nick Nolte – by adoptive parents who have deemed him too ill to make the trip, and Daryl Hannah appears at the head of a gang of ghostly angels.
Further explanation is redundant, since this is one of those movies set entirely within the skewed imaginative universe of its creators. If you’re looking for reference points, though, the influence of David Lynch is very clearly visible in Northfork’s Gothic and Biblical imagery, extremely sparse rural landscapes, and general air of black-hearted American Nightmare mystery.
In short, anyone with an eye for the original and challenging in cinema would be very well advised to check it out.

94 mins. Cert IFI members. Opens March 12