There is a specific kind of film that critics are embarrassed to admit they’re unsure about — one where the ambition is obvious, the performances are undeniable, and the whole thing still slides sideways in the second half. Holy Smoke! is that film. Jane Campion‘s 1999 follow-up to The Piano has all the intelligence and provocation you’d expect from a filmmaker working at the peak of her craft, and yet it’s also genuinely, interestingly uneven. That tension is, in a strange way, exactly what makes this Blu-Ray release compelling. A messy film from a great director, preserved for the first time in a standalone English-friendly edition.

Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet, Blackbird) finds spiritual transformation in India and comes home a different person. Her family’s response is to hire P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel, Sister Act), a professional cult exit counselor, to deprogram her in a remote desert location. What begins as a power struggle between a macho American and an iron-willed young woman becomes something considerably stranger — a mutual unraveling, a sexual and philosophical collision that neither party fully survives intact.

Campion isn’t interested in a tidy debate about faith versus reason. She’s more fascinated by who gets to hold power in a room, and what happens when the person who walks in holding all of it walks out with none. Winslet is extraordinary — she was riding the wave of Titanic‘s success (and her second Oscar nomination) when this came out, and she used it to do exactly the opposite of what studios would have preferred. Keitel, for his part, brings the same bruising unpredictability he brought to The Piano eight years earlier. 

Dion Beebe‘s cinematography is the film’s most consistent pleasure. The Indian opening sequences have a lush, saturated warmth, and the Flinders Ranges sequences in South Australia carry a brutal, arid beauty. Composer Angelo Badalamenti assembles a soundtrack from an improbable roster — Neil Diamond, Annie Lennox, Alanis Morissette — and somehow it works.

The Region B Blu-Ray itself comes with a rigid slipcase and a modest but worthwhile extras slate. Anna Campion’s interview on the writing process, “The Art of Sisterhood,” is illuminating about how the sisters turned their own arguments about God and belief into the film’s central confrontation. Beebe’s piece on the visual approach is equally good. The original trailer and image gallery fill out a package that is, by modern standards, fairly lean.

And that leanness is worth naming honestly: if you’ve never seen Holy Smoke (which is sometimes written with an ‘!’), this release isn’t going to wow you with supplements. It was previously only available as part of a French Jane Campion boxset and an Australian Imprint package. This edition — the first standalone English-region physical release in years — exists primarily to put the film back in circulation. For Campion devotees, Winslet completionists, or anyone curious about one of the more genuinely strange films either performer has made, that’s more than enough reason to own it.