Godless: Netflix's brilliant dusty western allows Michelle Dockery to exorcise Lady Mary's ghost – review

Think of Michelle Dockery and it’s hard to picture her as anyone other than Lady Mary. Dockery can take on a wide range of roles, but Downton Abbey’s steely, stand-offish aristocrat has always been there, hovering like a spectre. Godless (Netflix), a languorous and quite brilliant new western produced by Steven Soderbergh, may have changed that. As Alice Fletcher, a two-time widow living with her American Indian son and mother-in-law on a ranch in New Mexico, Dockery goes some way to exorcising Lady Mary, delivering a fine study in no-nonsense doughtiness. Threaten Fletcher’s family and you will suffer for it. 

Written and directed by Scott Frank (Logan), this seven-parter has classic films such as Shane and The Searchers coursing through its veins. Set in 1884, it bears all the hallmarks of the genre: sharp shooting, galloping horses, dusty saloon bars. But Godless also has a contemporary feel to it, deftly weaving issues such as gender, race and sexual orientation into a narrative so gripping that I watched the whole lot in one sitting. 

At its heart, the series is about Frank Griffin (a terrifying Jeff Daniels) and his notoriously brutal gang of outlaws’ obsessed pursuit of their former ally Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell), by whom they were betrayed and who is now hiding out at Fletcher’s property. That Fletcher lives outside a town populated almost entirely by women due to a mining accident that killed nearly all of the local men adds considerable intrigue – you just know these women will be dragged into a mass showdown with Griffin’s boys. 

“This here is the paradise of the locust, the lizard, the snake,” says Griffin at one point. “It’s the land of the blade and the rifle. It’s godless country.” No Netflix drama has been this lyrical and yet crisply understated: expect it to triumph at next year’s Emmys.