Women never have a particularly great time in Westerns. Aside from the odd outlier, the genre generally features them as either helpless victims or sex workers, though both endure intense violence at the hands of men. Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone takes this to new extremes; spending most of its 140 punishing minutes inflicting humiliation, misery and trauma upon its female characters.

By the time the credits roll, you’ll have seen women intimidated, leered at, strangled, punched, whipped, beaten, gagged, having their tongues cut out, sexually menaced by their fathers, repeatedly raped and eventually executed. It’s a smörgåsbord of misogyny: a film populated by yellow-teethed, half feral, sexually psychotic men preying on women whose only plausible escape is suicide. Brimstone is less a battle of the sexes and more a massacre.

Split into four chapters, each with portentous Biblical titles like ‘Revelations’ and ‘Exodus,’ the film consists of episodes in...