A Single Shot – first look review

Sam Rockwell puts in a tremendous shift as a bearded loner who stumbles across some very nasty bad guys in this tough, macabre, but somewhat overcooked thriller. Rockwell plays John Moon, a shotgun-wielding trailer-dweller who is scrabbling an isolated existence in a remote patch of woodland: not because he's a Unabomber-type radical survivalist, but because his wife has dumped him, he can't hold down a job and he's too proud to work for the new owner of the farm his parents lost to the bank years earlier.

Moon's specific troubles, for the purposes of this film, begin when he's out trying to poach deer in a nature conservation park. A couple of ill-advised volleys into a shrub, and Moon finds he's shot dead a young woman camping out in the wilds. While he's figuring out what to do with the body Moon turns up a handgun and a large box of cash. Realising this is no ordinary hiker, Moon does what anyone else would do: steal the money, dump the corpse inside a discarded rubbish compactor and stage the scene to make it look like a suicide. I suppose that's one way of dealing with it, rather than reporting it to the police; this is a world where everyone is an ex-con, a porno junkie or a hooch-swilling housebreaker.

It's to Rockwell's credit that this deranged opening doesn't throw him off his stride. Moon's focus is on an obviously doomed attempt to reconnect with his wife (Kelly Reilly), but soon he is getting sinister phone calls and bloodcurdling harassment from whoever it was who'd left the money there. This takes events into rather more horror-movie territory – you immediately think of the phone-wielding nasty in Scream – as Moon alternates between barricading himself into his trailer and heading off to try to disappear from view.

William H Macy steals a few scenes as an oddball lawyer called Daggard Pitt, though he has a little more to work with than Jason Isaacs, as thuggish local villain Waylon.

As befits the blood-and-mud spattered backdrop, there's much gruesome razor-slicing and corpse-lugging on display: a forceful reminder, you would suppose, of the elemental natural forces at work. Only Rockwell's stunned fatalism as one horrible thing after another happens prevents things lurching entirely into Grand Guignol. There are a couple too many plotlines that go nowhere, one or two things that are telegraphed too obviously in advance and a score that presses too heavily on the pedal at key moments to give this film the precision it aspires to, but Rockwell's performance makes it worth watching.