Dir: Antonia Bird, Czechia, Mexico, UK, USA, 1999, 101m

Ravenous is a deliciously macabre piece of cinematic mischief, a historical horror film that refuses to settle comfortably into any single genre. Set against the bleak, snowbound wilderness of nineteenth-century America, it begins as a military adventure before slipping into something far stranger: a fable about fear, appetite, cowardice and the savage instincts lurking beneath the thin veneer of civilisation.

Guy Pearce plays Captain John Boyd, a soldier whose reputation rests on an act of extraordinary bravery that conceals a rather less heroic truth. Posted to an isolated frontier garrison, he finds himself drawn into a rescue mission involving a mysterious stranger, played with unnerving relish by Robert Carlyle. What follows is a progressively more deranged exploration of cannibalism, in which the hunger for human flesh becomes an unsettling metaphor for power, ambition and the desire to transcend ordinary human limitations.

Bird handles the material with a cheekily perverse sense of humour. The violence is often shocking, but the film’s black comedy prevents the horror from becoming ponderous, while its moments of genuine grotesquerie are balanced by an almost absurdist awareness of the characters’ predicament. Pearce’s restrained, increasingly desperate performance provides an effective counterpoint to Carlyle’s feral, charismatic menace. The tension between them gives the film much of its disturbing energy.

The wilderness setting is integral to its success. The landscape feels both beautiful and hostile, a place where the familiar rules of society have lost their authority. Visually, the film favours an austere, wintry atmosphere that makes the characters seem physically and morally stranded. Yet it is the score, by Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn, that gives Ravenous its truly distinctive character. Its strange, jagged rhythms and unexpected shifts in tone refuse the reassuring conventions of a conventional horror soundtrack, lending the film an almost delirious, off-kilter momentum.

There is something more troubling beneath the cannibalistic spectacle, too. The film’s appetite for consumption mirrors the brutality of conquest and the competitive instincts of men in uniform, suggesting that savagery is not an aberration confined to the wilderness but something civilisation itself may encourage.

Uneven by design, perhaps, and certainly not for the squeamish, Ravenous is nevertheless an audacious, singular film: gruesome, darkly funny and genuinely unsettling. Its refusal to behave like a conventional horror film is precisely its greatest strength. More than a quarter of a century after its release, it remains an exceptionally strange and entertaining feast.

Part of Halloween at The Garden Cinema 28 October