America, 1823. A hunter for a band of soldiers led by Captain Henry, Hugh Glass, accompanied by his son, survives a bloody attack by Arikara Indians. Fleeing with the survivors, he is mauled by a wounded bear and seriously injured. Left for dead by his fellow hunters, he finds himself alone in the world, amidst the wild, frozen wasteland...

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The Revenant is not a film, it is a transcendental experience, a sensational, intense and dazzling journey. The trap would be to reduce the movie’s power to the extraordinary shoot orchestrated by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Birdman, 21 Grams) and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity), who filmed the amazing scenery using only natural light, in extreme conditions. But its incredible strength (also) lies elsewhere: in its diffuse brutality, its narrative abstraction, its amazingly immersive quality, which plunge the audience into an epic from which it may not emerge totally unscathed – as if part remained locked in the movie’s white hell, profoundly changed by the main character’s nightmare. Inarritu’s incredible camera (a great master of the art of camouflaging special effects) seems to defy gravity in composing his great symphony, in which Leonardo DiCaprio struggles within sound and fury. The year has barely begun, but The Revenant is already one of its great films and is surely poised to offer DiCaprio Hollywood’s ultimate reward, since he has been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the fifth time.