DVD review: The Horseman (****)

Raw, brutal and totally uncompromising, Steven Kastrissios' blood-soaked revenge thriller The Horseman is like an Australian mash-up of Deathwish and Hardcore. Following the death of his only daughter from a heroin overdose, grief-stricken pest control worker Christian (Peter Marshall) sets out to punish those responsible, after discovering she appeared in a gonzo porno film shortly before she died. Traveling across Australia in his white van with only a fragile hitchhiker (Caroline Marohasy) and his toolbox for company, Christian embarks on a devastatingly potent journey of vengeance. Despite a miniscule budget, writer-director Kastrissios wrings the maximum visceral impact from Christian's almost Biblical retribution, while Marshall manages to imbue his character with enough conflicting emotions so you're always on his side, even as he's pummeling a man to death with an iron bar, stabbing them in the neck with a knife, or, in one excruciating sequence, using an bicycle pump to inflate someone's... well, let's not go there. Quite brilliant.