Last year, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s dazzling Birdman deservedly won the best picture Oscar. Just 12 months later, the Mexican director returns with a work that only a filmmaker riding stratospherically high would attempt: a punishing survival epic shot in the wilds of Canada using only natural light. The Revenant, though, is more Apocalypse Now than Heaven’s Gate.

Based in part on Michael Punke’s 2002 novel, the story is stark bordering on scrawny. In 1820s America, frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is left for dead by fellow fur trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and companions, after attacks by Native Americans and other indignant indigents. Hungry for vengeance – and food – Glass hobbles back to “civilisation” across the unforgiving icescapes.

Though the story is supposedly true, it beggars belief that Glass could live through such an ordeal, and DiCaprio goes through almost comedic levels of hardship to bag that elusive Oscar, at one point staring into the camera as if entreating voters directly.