Directed by Rod Lurie. Starring James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård, Dominic Purcell, Rhys Coiro, James Woods 18 cert, gen release, 109 min

A remake of Peckinpah's violent thriller is morally queasy but effective, writes DONALD CLARKE

A RECENT BBC documentary on the British Board of Film Classification made the point that, though most earlier controversies involving movie certification now appear ridiculous, a few films now seem more unacceptable than they did at the point of release.

Sam Peckinpah's 1971 Straw Dogsis a case in point. Remember that scene in which Susan George (possibly dreaming) seemed to enjoy being raped by West Country yokels? Good luck flogging that in an age more attuned to feminist thinking.

Rod Lurie’s annoyingly effective remake cleans that sequence up somewhat, but this remains an extraordinarily dubious piece of film-making. The citizens of the US’s poorest state come across as mindless psychopaths. A man is not a man until he picks up a weapon. The attitude towards women defies easy summary. Much of the film’s power comes from the queasy awareness that one is watching something faintly offensive. An evening of bear-baiting would have much the same effect.

Lurie has moved the action from Cornwall to the backwaters of Mississippi.

Once again, an urban intellectual (James Marsden) – now a screenwriter – takes his young wife (Kate Bosworth) to the town where she grew up. It rapidly becomes clear that the locals view any deviation from supposed rural norms with great suspicion. Just look at this guy. He tries to pay for his beer with a credit card. He listens to classical music. He keeps fit by jumping rope. Why does the sound of a million Tea Partiers shouting “We want our country back” seem to echo around the forbidding swamp lands?

Lurie has kept the story pretty much intact. Once again, a young man with Village Idiot Syndrome causes the citizens to lock up their daughters at night. As before, the hero’s wife, a moderately successful actor, remains equivocal about her birthplace: she hates the small-mindedness, but resents her husband’s inability to stand up to intimidation.

In truth, this is a picture in which nobody does or says the right thing. The gap-toothed hicks – led by a supremely unreasonable James Woods – do not seem at home to civilisation. But Marsden still comes across as a bit of a snob. Bosworth reasonably points out that, by dressing skimpily, she is not inviting inappropriate attention. However, she then undermines her case by deliberately waving her pointy bits at the guys working sweatily on the roof of the barn.

Lurie almost certainly savours the unease that such equivocalness scares up. We place our hands over our eyes for all kinds of conflicting reasons. The sense of discomfort is further exacerbated by an accumulation of tension that points inexorably towards a final, impressively staged conflagration.

It is some measure of Lurie’s talent for moral unease that the eventual descent into unambiguous violence comes as a welcome relief (or release). We know where we stand with this sort of thing. Don’t we?