If you’re looking for new directorial talent that is not just producing another quirky drama, The Last Thakur provides a unique alternative. A moody, slow-burning film that drags elements of the Western genre wholesale into the setting of a small Bangladeshi village, it is certainly not something you see everyday.

Like any good Western, we are set up with a small town where there’s a lot going on. A lone gunman has wandered in, nobody knows where he’s from or what he wants, but as the only man with a gun in this small village he soon becomes part of a tug-of-war between the local power brokers. In charge of the village is ‘The Chairman’, a Muslim from the area who runs the place (supposedly) with the interests of the people at heart. He is fighting to take what remains of Thakur, one of the last remaining Hindu landowners in the area. Thakur, his influence waning and his support limited to a blind beggar man, is not well at all, and he has become obsessed with using what remains of his power and land to build a temple: a monument to his lost lover.

Naturally the pair of bigwigs seek to curry favour with the gun-toting stranger, but he has motives of his own. He is wandering from village to village searching for the man who raped and killed his mother, with only a tatty old birth certificate with a faded signature to guide him to justice. As the mystery unfolds, the stage is set for a final showdown which will change the way of life in the village forever.

Dialogue-heavy and with a strong-focus on the cinematography, the film is not the rip-roaring joy-ride that filmmakers such as Kim Jee-Woon and Takashi Miike have created in merging Westerns with their own culture, but nor does it quite reach the giddy heights of films such as No Country For Old Men in appropriating the genre for a new context. The washed-out bleakness of the Bangladeshi scenery is an achievement in itself, and the isolation of the village in which the action takes place adds to tension, but the characters are too archetypal (both as Western characters and Bangladeshi villagers) and the action too sparse for the film to be completely absorbing.

Nonetheless, it does have its merits. There is enough going on in the subplots to keep all but the shortest of attention spans engaged on the screen, and a Bengali Western is a welcome alternative to generic cinema output for fans of Westerns and Bengali speakers alike. A promising and original first feature from Sadik Ahmed.