“Slow West” certainly lives up to its title: It’s one poky Western, plodding and perambulating and moseying across the 1870 frontier on a grim march to a pointless ending.

Kodi Smit-McPhee plays a Scottish aristocrat wandering old Colorado in search of his disappeared girlfriend (Caren Pistorius), who left the home country under mysterious circumstances that gradually become clear in interspersed flashbacks. He hooks up with an experienced gunslinger (Michael Fassbender) with secrets of his own, who agrees to protect him from desperadoes as the pair plod on.

Portentous in its style without actually saying much of anything except that things were dangerous in olden days, the film is leading up to one of those climaxes that’s meant to be bitterly ironic. Instead it more or less renders the whole story null.