Revisionist westerns have been around since “Stagecoach,” but the trajectory of the genre—traveling as it does through the work of Sergio Leone , Quentin Tarantino , Jordan Peele and even John Ford himself—has arced, ever so inevitably, toward madness and horror. Which is director Hugo Blick ’s intended destination in “The English.”“It cannot be that this whole country is only full of killers and thieves,” says Lady Cornelia Locke ( Emily Blunt ), reflecting on the America of 1890, to which she has traveled from England in order to avenge the death of her son. And she’s right: There are also psychopaths, sadists, rapists, racists, idiots, imbeciles, religious fanatics and carnival freaks. They pepper a landscape whose panoramic vistas Mr. Blick emphasizes with poetic intentions, interrupted only now and then by spasms of violence and rivers of blood.

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