This epically long, lurid, violent western from Dutch film-maker Martin Koolhoven has a kind of Tarantino-ish prolixity and narrative ingenuity. Despite its very indulgent length, it never bores.

Three intriguingly arranged chapters keep you wanting to know more – but the fourth and final segment relies on an outrageously unconvincing “escape” scene and a sheriff’s arrest that needs to be explained with a POV-shift flashback that does not entirely make sense.

It’s maintained by a kind of beady-eyed fanaticism in the performances and the story’s freaky Old Testament transgressions. In a pioneer community of Dutch settlers in the old west, Liz (Dakota Fanning) is a mute woman, married to a decent widower, stepmother to his headstrong boy and mother to a little girl of her own. She is much admired for her skills as a midwife. But Liz is terrified when a new hellfire preacher comes into town to take up his job in the pulpit: the gaunt and scarred Reverend, played menacingly by Guy Pearce.

Where has this sinister man come from? It’s a question disturbingly but tacitly answered by the grisly end of the second chapter: the silent inference is one of the film’s best effects.

Fanning has a fiercely defiant presence and Pearce is a kind of low-decibel Nic Cage: an outrageously operatic performance, kept in bounds. It holds together for over two hours, before unravelling in the last quarter of an hour.