Scarcely a warm-toned color appears in The Revenant, save for the orange-yellow of fire and deep burgundy of blood. North American wilderness, riddled with bison herds and engulfed in relentless cold, competes with Leonardo DiCaprio to garner the most emotion. The result is beautiful, a clash of human action and nature set at a time when the outdoors still served as our predator.

Set in the early 1800s, The Revenant follows star Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) on his quest for revenge against John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), murderer of Glass’s half-Native-American son. In the two-and-a-half-hour film, DiCaprio desperately clings to life, fueled by love for his dead son and hate for his dead son’s murderer. In one scene, DiCaprio, in the efforts to stay warm and alive, slices open his recently deceased horse, hauls out its guts, strips mostly naked, and crawls inside. It’s a testament to human creativity of survival.

The movie criticizes the maltreatment of Native Americans by Europeans, but also points towards the shared identity of Europeans and Native Americans as human. Both display forgiveness. Both display fury. Both display desire for revenge.

The movie’s aesthetic also draws parallels to Romantic Era ideas of awe and enormity of nature versus puniness of humans. I felt this parallel in particular when DiCaprio was alone, wounded, famished, and freezing, overwhelmed by a wilderness much vaster than himself. I thought that this wilderness in the movie had gone extinct, that such frontiers had disappeared with the wanton mass killing of American buffalo. The fact that this movie could successfully capture a part of the world thought to be gone speaks to the skill of the filmmakers.

The frequent sun flare in the camera and  shots of the wilderness also introduce a glamour to the film that makes one paradoxically long to be there, back and connected with nature, no matter its savagery.The height of the Romantic Period occurred during the early 1800s, the same time the movie took place, making me contemplate chicken-or-the-egg-esque questions of this aesthetic’s origins: Were some of the ideas of the Romantic Era a byproduct of the simultaneous exploration of beautiful frontiers like the one in The Revenant? Or, rather, did the movie’s filmmakers purposefully play with this idea of nature considering the historical timeframe of the movie?

At times the plot is difficult to follow and the dialogue hard to understand. I was left confused by how DiCaprio could speak a Native American language, and how his relationship with a Native American woman developed. Still, I appreciate the unconventionality of the mystery.

The film ends with a shot of DiCaprio’s eyes, cinematography that could have easily turned cliché. (What? A close-up of watery eyes at the end of a movie?! Groundbreaking!) However, the potency of DiCaprio’s emotion sets a new standard of acting, as if all other similar face close-ups were just trying to live up to his. DiCaprio’s weathered, grief-stricken face conveys a raw, tragic beauty, punctuating a film just as worthy of praise.

The Revenant is not for the light of heart, or impatient. However, its two hours and thirty six minutes are beautiful and, in many ways, philosophical, bringing up questions of humanity’s role in revenge, and the nature of human action.