The Hateful Eight

Annotation for KRRR! 2016 by Petr Svárovský

In his eighth feature film, as the director of The Hateful Eight himself calls it in the opening credits (although the number may seem low considering the division of Kill Bill into two parts and his participation in a number of other films), Quentin Tarantino returns to his favorite western genre after Django Unchained. He moves forward a few years to the period after the end of the Civil War to snow-covered Wyoming. Bounty hunter and former cavalryman Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) loses his horse while transporting three dead bodies to the town of Red Rock. His salvation from the storm seems to be a meeting with the stagecoach of another manhunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), and the captive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) from Domergue's gang. Despite initial distrust, John "Kat" Ruth allows Major Marquis to get into the carriage and continue with them. He does the same when he encounters another traveler desperately struggling with the snow, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims to be the newly elected sheriff of Red Rock. However, the attempt to escape the storm is in vain, and so the group has no choice but to take refuge in Minnie's haberdashery...

The Hateful Eight sticks to proven strategies. Tarantino relies on several of his favorite actors and divides the plot into limited chapters. As in other Tarantino films, however, the essential dialogues play an absolutely key role this time, when most of the film takes place in a single room. All information about the characters is given precisely through dialogues, and their credibility is questionable. This makes it very difficult to identify good and evil or the motivations of the characters. The question is not whether any of the heroes will succeed in achieving their goal, but rather who among them is hiding what and who is not who they claim to be. It is this combination of curiosity and tension that skillfully keeps the attention throughout the story.