A haunting, immersive and grizzly cinematic experience, The Revenant features Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu at the height of his filmmaking prowess, while an all-in Leonardo DiCaprio delivers the performance of a lifetime.

The evolution of Innaritu the filmmaker is both startling and fascinating. Originally known for his multi character tapestry’s (21 Grams, Babel), Innaritu’s break with screenwriter Guillermo Alliaga unleashed a bolder and riskier beast of a director whose blending of the epic with the intimate resulted in cinematic experiences both unique and masterful.

And so it continues with The Revenant, a gritty revenge story that sucks its audience into a world of snow, blood and grizzly vengeance, and astounds with its epic scope that makes 3D look like the chump change novelty that it is, Inarritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki thrusting us into an icy hell that mesmerises with its beauty and intimidates with its magnitude. Unless the Academy are inclined to go the Roger Deakins route, look for Lubezki to get his third straight Oscar for cinematography.

Speaking of a sure thing at the Oscars, The Revenant stars four time acting nominee Leonardo DiCaprio as a fictionalised version of legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass, who after mauled by a grizzly bear (a gobsmacking scene where there is most definitely no bear rape) he suffers the horror of watching his son of half Pawnee Indian heritage Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) killed at the hand of fur trapper and criminal Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy, completing a stellar year with a villainous performance of many moods and shades.)

Left for dead by Fitzgerald, a broken and wounded Glass escapes his shallow grave and embarks on an odyssey of revenge through a harsh winter where if nature doesn’t get you, a tribe of vengeful Native Americans surely will.

There have been many examples of thespians gone grizzly (Robert De Niro in The Mission, Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans), and DiCaprio’s turn as Glass is one of the best: a grunting, grinding, spitting, all-in physical performance that astonishes in its dedication to the grit and grime. Completing the performance is the portrayal of a soul wounded and hardened by hardship and tragedy, a scar-tissue spirituality complete with haunting visions that reminds of the thin veil between this world and the next.

One scene where DiCaprio’s Glass embraces the spirit of his dead son in the haunted grounds of a hollowed out church is one of emotional and symbolic significance. Inarritu’s work has always contained a deep spirituality (the director himself an abiding Catholic), and The Renevant is especially deep and complex in its underlying, pulsating reminder of a time where grace struggled to breakthrough the seal of violence that engulfed a nation.

A lot can be taken from The Revenant. Most importantly, is that this is a film experience unlike any other this year.