Sadism in cinema is back – with (as they say) a vengeance. In Quentin Tarantino's THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015), a Western built to a 70 millimetre, widescreen scale, a tough prisoner with the deceptively dainty name of Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has to suffer a great deal while handcuffed to the ruthless bounty hunter, John Ruth (Kurt Russell). She is repeatedly silenced with a punch in the face. As people die around her, she is showered with blood (and guts) that no one ever bothers to clean off. The brains of her own, dearly beloved brother are splattered over her with a gun blast. Finally, she undergoes a particularly savage and agonising death by hanging. That does not even begin to catalogue the fancy reams of obscene, verbal abuse (the Tarantino speciality) that she must endure from a gaggle of men while she is still breathing.

Why such hostility directed at Daisy, in particular? Just about every major character in the movie is equally “hateful”, equally scheming, equally duplicitous. Tarantino works to a strange formula: revisiting the huis clos premise of his debut feature, RESERVOIR DOGS (1992) – even bringing back Michael Madsen and Tim Roth for this commemorative self-congratulation – he slowly cranks up an agonising, dramatic tension (everybody is locked into a snowbound cabin that seems as vast as a Hilton hotel) that simply has to be released somewhere, somehow, in paroxysmic split-seconds of carnage-cum-catharsis.