There's a stark, haunting beauty within the land called Kekexili -- Tibetan for "Beautiful mountains, beautiful women" -- that threatens to smother the human drama being played out between the patrolmen risking their lives to preserve the antelope and the poachers who use their skins to create obscenely expensive scarves. No matter what the scene, be it a closeup of an action taking place in a river or a medium shot of vehicles traversing a barren, empty land, Kekexili is undoubtedly the main character in this gorgeous but bleak film, a hostile land that in one of the movie's most striking moments, swallows a lone patrolman whole when he makes the mistake of stepping over quicksand.<br /><br />As an action movie, only the first scene is really where the brutality ensues as antelope are systematically killed (right in front of the camera, which makes it a tad intense for anyone not used to these images) and the patrolman trying to protect them gets a bullet in his head. It gets quickly established from the get-go that these poachers are soulless individuals whose greed has led them to destroy the wildlife, which makes the plight of Ri Tai, a man whose life has been committed to the cause of the antelope, and Ga Yu, a reporter who gets involved in the case, more relevant even when everyone else gets blurred in the background and it seems that there will be no solution to this matter.<br /><br />KEKEXILI is a tricky movie to classify even when it's clearly grounded in thriller and action roots due to the overpowering nature of the place where it's set and its refusal to romanticize its two lead characters. If anything, it can be seen as a silent film, one that tells its story in mute yet powerful images, and in doing so, gets its message across.