Guy Pearce, the Aussie actor who was a potent force in L.A. Confidential, plays John Boyd, a soldier in the Spanish-American War who backed into heroism by playing dead. For his tainted victory, he's sent to a remote fort in the Sierra Nevada, where he finds Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones) presiding over a handful of dirty misfits. One day a half-frozen man calling himself Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle) stumbles out of the mountains with a tale of a lost wagon train and the extreme measures he and his starving companions took to survive. He's acquired a taste for human flesh that gives him superhuman powers of healing and survival, and as he disposes of the garrison, it's up to Boyd to resist his cult-like appeal.

Carlyle, who bolstered The Full Monty with an understated, humanistic comic performance, revels in the villainous possibilities of the movie's head chef. But he never goes overboard into screaming, eye-rolling, Gary Oldman territory, preferring to play the role as a charismatic but reasonable gourmand. Although Carlyle has the showy part and gets most of the good lines, it's Pearce who makes the film work. The protagonist of a horror film is mainly required for reaction shots, and most actors run out of interesting ways to look terrified pretty quickly. But Pearce finds divisions and subdivisions of fear, revulsion, weariness, and pain, and he expresses them all without histrionics.