The Proposition

Made-for-Welsh-TV period drama, with a recently widowed (and recently indebted) bourgeois wife forced to take her herd of cattle south-east to Gloucester to sell them to the army to save her ancient pile. It was billed as a Wales-ian Western and, true, the shots of the landscape are impressively handled, but its Napoleonic War background is just so much red-coated colour. The dramatic triangle (she takes brawling and boozing bastard Rhys along as drover; his legit brother Huw, the sheriff, a demented and murderously insane man, clearly suffering from unrequited love, follows on) is too standard to generate genuine emotion or frisson.