Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant (20th Century Fox)

As has been reported often over the past year, The Revenant was a troubled shoot, where the budget rose to great heights and crew walked off over the unendurable conditions on location in the woods of Alberta, Canada, where the temperature went down to minus 40 below. To the actors’ credit, most of all Leonardo DiCaprio, they make it look and feel like the toughest, grittiest movie of the year. But the question becomes, is it too much enthralled by its own harsh beauty?

Somewhere in the 1820s frontier wilderness, Will Glass (DiCaprio), a tracker and fur trapper, leads a group of civilian engineers engaged in a U.S. military expedition (headed by Domnhall Gleeson’s no-nonsense captain). At the start of the story, they are ambushed by a Native tribe. Only about eight or nine men are left, including Glass, his mixed-raced son, and Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who is squarely in the mission for the money. What really kicks off the story, though, is when Glass is attacked by a bear and left for dead. Fitzgerald and a greenhorn (Will Poulter) try to bring the wounded Glass back to the base camp on a makeshift stretcher, but in a moment alone, Fitzgerald buries Glass in a grave and kills his son. While Fitzgerald and another man press on, Glass has to dig himself up, wounded, and seek his revenge.

Oh yes, this bear attack is about the most vicious you’ll see on film. Matter of fact, I haven’t seen any other review that doesn’t include the words “brutal” or “devastating” in describing it. A lot of its impact comes down to how director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki film it, not just in this scene but in many others. By not cutting away, they keep the camera squarely, almost obsessively, on Glass. Because there’s no opportunity to look away from the mauling, the sense of tension is palpable and nothing less than harrowing. This same approach was used in their last collaboration, Birdman, though that was ultimately a (dark) comedy. Here, when we see DiCaprio mangled by the bear (albeit a CGI creation a la the tiger in Life of Pi), it’s completely staggering.

It’s an obvious highlight of the gorgeously grotesque, and it’s symptomatic about what’s good and perhaps not so good about The Revenant. It’s a film where the actors totally commit to their roles, and yet I was more intrigued by Hardy’s character than DiCaprio’s. Ultimately, the main star is the one the audience has the most sympathy for, and like many survival movies, we see Glass in an extraordinary situation. It’s staggering to see how he can heal from the wounds, much less walk. But there isn’t much complexity to the character: he had a Native wife, who died in an attack years earlier from an attack by a French troop, and their son is killed by Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, we get to know Fitzgerald more, and he doesn’t come off as some monster. Hardy plays him as someone who tries to justify to himself his behavior. Every time the focus went back to Hardy, and his conflicted, intense eyes, I was hooked. When it turned to DiCaprio, I was engaged but not to the point of being as involved as Iñárritu intended.

If there’s one person who gets in the way of greatness for this film, it may be the director. There’s little question his intent is to capture the feel of constant danger in this uncharted territory, whether it’s from wild animals or warring tribes, but Iñárritu never lets up on the intensity. Every scene is directed to be like it’s the most important, even if it’s a relatively quiet one, mostly shot in an unbroken long take. It becomes a problem with the flow of the story. By the time of the climax, I was worn out (it’s long, too, at 156 minutes). It’s the sort of daring picture that is so dark and dreary in tone—in a return for this director to what he did before Birdman with 21 Grams and Babel—that there’s little room to breathe.

In other words, if during this holiday season you and your family are looking for a brooding, hard-R, superviolent movie where that formerly cute Titanic heartthrob DiCaprio gets attacked by a bear and uses a disemboweled deer carcass for warmth, then this is for you. It may even be poetry, but it’s the poetry of excess.