The Proposition is a Western set in Australia. Though the only reason you can tell where it’s set is the occasional accent, name-check by character, or the appearance of Aborigines. Beyond those relatively minor distinctions, almost everything else plays out the same; the Aborigines didn’t seem to have a much better lot than black men in the South, and the urge to “civilize at any cost” still strikes the sanctimonious and the greedy. If anything, director John Hillcoat and writer Nick Cave’s vision of 19th century Australia is every unforgiving art house Western you’ve ever seen—only much more so.

The Burns brothers are a notorious Irish gang ripping through the Australian outback. Charlie (Guy Pearce, gaunt as he’s ever been) is on the run with his simple younger brother Mikey (Richard Wilson). They’ve recently left the rest of the gang, led by the eldest and most vicious brother Arthur (Danny Huston, unlike you’ve ever seen him.) When the movie begins, Charlie and Mikey have been cornered by Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), an army man with an urge to tame the wildness out of Australia. He gives Charlie the proposition: Hunt down and kill Arthur, or he’ll execute Mikey. Brutal, yes, but as with so many characters in The Proposition, the good Captain is only as brutal as he believes he needs to be. Australia is unforgiving. What many of the players don’t seem to realize is that it’s so unforgiving because they make it so.

Charlie treasures Mikey and, like so many others, considers Arthur a lost cause, so the choice for him is simple. He’ll follow the trail of his brother and the remnants of their gang into the bad lands of Australia, far beyond where even bounty hunters dare go. Stanley stays behind to guard Mikey from the vengeful intentions of the townfolk and his own tender-footed wife (Emily Watson). The Burns gang raped and killed a well-loved family, and though there are hints that this atrocity took place after Charlie and Mikey left them, there’s little doubt they’d committed similar crimes in the past. Charlie and Mikey are every bit as guilty as everyone believes them to be.

Which is, ultimately, my main issue with The Proposition: Most of the characters are genuinely awful people, with a few whose saving grace is that they are simply naïve or mentally deficient. These are bad men pursuing worse men because that is the game they’ve locked themselves into. Knowing the writer was Nick Cave and the star was Guy Pearce in full-on Haunted Cipher mode, along with the premise, indicated a hearty dark streak. But I still don’t think I was prepared for just how dark, just how grim, just how remorseless.

In seventh grade, I remember asking my English teacher—even then, someone I could identify as a very sharp lady—if she liked Stephen King books. (I’d just started reading The Stand right around that time.) No, she said, somewhat firmly. “Life has enough horror in it already.” The statement floored me and gave me food for thought (still does, obviously) and was not the last time I’d been confronted with that sort of logic, horror fan that I am. (Most recently I’ve seen that charge leveled—not without cause—at There Will Be Blood. My first reaction was to balk and repeat the argument so fondly used by schlockmeisters like Eli Roth: Through art we can look atrocity in the face, this sort of thing goes on all the time, yadda yadda. And there is some truth to that; using an argument to peddle bullshit does not necessarily make the argument itself bullshit.

But I find that, as the years go on, I understand the “life has enough horror in it already” argument more and more.

Which feels like a betrayal to my horror roots. But I’m beginning to see the difference between “nihilistic horror with a point” (observe No Country for Old Men or Ravenous, easily one of my favorite horror movies of all time), and “horror for horror’s sake.” Horror for horror’s sake isn’t without merit, but those merits tend to skew pretty young: To shock someone out of a comfort zone, to leave someone reeling, to strip their defenses away and shake them at their core. I would equate the appeal of the experience to skydiving. Both are cathartic experiences, and horror for horror’s sake can be as nuanced as any of its “higher” brethren.

But there is no visceral thrill or id-shock in The Proposition. It is a grim, joyless film, mired in depression, forced to watch bad men do terrible things. I do not believe every movie must have a shred of hope or a happy ending, but there is a point where a filmmaker has simply stacked the deck and rigged the game. If the message of The Proposition is that folks were pretty terrible to each other in bygone days, and their actions are what built our society, then I can only say we’ve seen that done better, elsewhere. Unforgiven or Deadwood manage to couple illumination with their grim tidings. The Proposition is beautifully shot, well-acted, and at times mesmerizing. But in service to what?