The Last Rites Of Ransom Pride

In 1901, a young girl named Juliette watches her village destroyed by Mexican troops. She answers the massacre herself, cutting the throat of the commander responsible while he sleeps. Eleven years later she is grown, and the violence of her childhood has never entirely left her.

When the outlaw Ransom Pride is gunned down in a Mexican border town after an arms deal collapses, his body is claimed by the Bruja — a brothel keeper who blames Ransom for the death of her brother. She will release the corpse on one condition: Juliette must bring her Ransom's younger brother in his place. Juliette rides north to Glory, Texas, and lures Champ Pride away from the family farm without telling him why.

What follows is a journey south pursued by Champ's father, the drunken Reverend Early Pride, and by the Confederate veteran Shepherd Graves. Russell shoots it as a border gothic — jump cuts, saturated flashbacks, circus performers drifting through the frame — closer to a graphic novel than to a traditional oater. The film premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2010.