For a long time, the western solidified a racial fiction, projecting onto the Old West a universe where only white men set the rules with clenched fists and loaded guns. What Jeymes Samuel achieves in his bold debut is more than a simple deconstruction of that myth: it is a narrative insurgency that destabilizes the axis of power that has always upheld the genre. By refusing invisibility, Samuel builds a western where Black centrality is no concession but a rightful claim — delivered through incendiary visuals and a rejection of didacticism. His film doesn’t seek to correct the past; it reimagines it with stylistic brutality and ideological clarity, reshaping cinema’s symbolic space for those historically consigned to the margins.
The choice of a hyperbolic aesthetic, deliberately detached from any attempt at documentary realism, is no whim: it’s a strategy of liberation. Samuel understands that the traditional codes of the western are, in themselves, expressions of dominance. Subverting these codes means rejecting the comfort of realism and embracing a choreographed delirium, where excess is an act of autonomy. The fight scenes, impeccable costumes, dreamlike sets, and eclectic soundtrack — fusing reggae with soul and highlife — establish a new audiovisual grammar. There’s no intent of historical authenticity, but a deliberate affirmation of excess, where every frame screams the urgency of claiming the screen with exuberance and defiance.
The film’s dramatic engine is ignited by an original wound: the founding violence that marks Nat Love in flesh and memory, transforming trauma into a demand for restitution. Yet the narrative refuses the typical path of vengeance. By gathering characters like Jim Beckwourth, Cuffee, and Stagecoach Mary around Nat, Samuel crafts a microcosm where the fight is not for abstract justice, but for the concrete possibility of reinvention. The antagonism between Love and Rufus Buck, instead of replaying the old clash of good versus evil, articulates internal tensions within the Black world, exposing opposing strategies of resistance in a landscape shaped by exclusion. Rufus, though brutal, embodies the bloody utopia of a denied autonomy, and it’s within this clash of visions that the film finds its most complex rhythm.
By stripping the western of its traditional targets — the demonized Indigenous figure, the sanctified settler — Samuel shifts focus to an internal battlefield, where each Black character carries traces of the structural violence that surrounds them. The brutality, then, is not gratuitous spectacle but a symptom of a reality where freedom is a constantly frustrated horizon. And if the final duel between Love and Buck delivers a twist that reshapes emotions and motivations, it does so to underline the tragic weight of a struggle with no absolute victors. No redemption comes without cost, and no story can be told without acknowledging the layers of pain beneath it.
The radical force of “The Harder They Fall” also lies in its refusal to dilute its symbolic power to satisfy conventional expectations. Samuel turns pastiche into a gesture of critical appropriation, where irony and sarcasm are as lethal as the guns on screen. Every line of dialogue, every frame, every visual explosion is crafted to unsettle the viewer, forcing them out of passivity. There are no explanatory concessions, only categorical affirmations of another mode of narrative existence. The sharp humor that eliminates a potential racial slur with a swift shot is not just a joke: it’s a manifesto.
It is, however, impossible to ignore the tensions that arise from the film’s own exuberance. At times, its visual virtuosity threatens to overpower its dramatic momentum, and relationships that could resonate emotionally — like that of Nat and Mary — fall short of their potential. Yet these cracks, far from weakening the film, reveal the fragmentary nature of a project that does not seek harmony, but creative dissonance. Samuel doesn’t craft a polished epic; he launches a visual and narrative challenge, a call for the western to finally become a space where Black identities can exist without permission, in their imperfect, defiant fullness.
“The Harder They Fall” does not look to the past with nostalgia, nor does it offer the present a fable of reconciliation. Its gesture is sharper: it demands the right to rewrite the myths that shaped the Western imagination. If the western has always mythologized conquest, Samuel redirects it to mythologize insurgency. His film doesn’t offer answers but pushes us toward new questions — about who gets to narrate, whose bodies can dream, which stories remain untold. In the end, Samuel’s greatest boldness is to suggest that, even without the promise of historical truth, cinema can be fertile ground for imagining possible futures. Not as utopia, but as a critical exercise in power and creation.
Film: The Harder They Fall
Director: Jeymes Samuel
Year: 2021
Genres: Drama/Western
Rating: 9/10