A white-knuckle tense thriller of impeccable craft and slow burn pace, Sorcerer features director William Friedkin at his best in this delve into the dark recesses of mankind, as four lost souls find themselves in a purgatory where the only exit is a treacherous path of certain doom.

The great thing about movies is that they live forever. This provides a chance for those lost gems, those mavericks, those outliers that were discarded upon release, to achieve resurrection through re-evaluation.

Sorcerer is a film that has done just that. An adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel “The Wages of Fear” (previously adapted into the classic 1953 French film directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot), this William Friedkin (The Exorcist) directed thriller of grit and gumption got lost in the fog of Star Wars mania (both films were released at the same time). However, a digital restoration released in 2013 provided fresh reassessment to what is now proven to now only be a criminally overlooked gem of a movie, but one of the best films in Friedkin’s filmography.

Sorcerer is set in the remote village of Porvenir in Chile, where four corrupted souls on the run for their crimes - Irish American gangster Scanlon (Roy Scheider), crooked French banker Manzon (Bruno Cremer), Palestinian terrorist Kassel (Amidou), and Mexican hit man Nilo (Francesco Bilal) - look for a way out of their self-imposed exile. Opportunity is found when an oil drilling operation needs drivers to transport cases of unstable dynamite across a volatile rocky road across the jungles and mountains of Chile. These criminals must rely upon one another to survive the journey.

Such a set-up is poised to be a thrilling watch, and Friedkin delivers just that with the reality based, documentary style filmmaking that would win him acclaim throughout his career, in which Sorcerer is a clear highlight.

With the majority of the film shot on location in Mexico, Friedkin creates an incredibly tense and tangible adventure thriller where its environment – dense jungles, treacherous mountains, poverty stricken villages – all encompasses an unforgiving world in which corrupt sinners pay a torturous penance. As such Sorcerer can be seen as a film about purgatory, in which these four men of varied background yet shared penchant for sin and corruption, toil in work and misery for their sins.

Performances from its international cast of character actors are all top rate. It takes extraordinary skill to gain sympathy for one easily despised character, let alone four, yet Friedkin achieves just that through his motely crew of characters who are put through an emotional, psychological, and physical gauntlet in their bid to escape this limbo they have imprisoned themselves in.

A key highlight (in a film that has many) is a sequence where these men must drive their rickety trucks (carrying unstable dynamite) across an old bridge held together by weathered rope and long-lost prayers. Friedkin had his special effects team build an actual bridge and placed upon it an actual truck (both held by wires and aided hydraulics), and the results is a stunning sequence of white-knuckle, sweating bullets, nail biting suspense, that no amount of modern filmmaking CGI could replicate.

The production of Sorcerer is indeed legendary, with Friedkin going over-budget and to the brink of insanity in the jungle before Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) did. With its curious title, 121 minute runtime, and international cast, it is understandable how Sorcerer became a notorious box-office bomb.Yet there is no denying the impeccable filmmaking on display here, with Friedkin at the top of his game in this delivery of a film that although spans the globe, is incredibly intimate in its themes of corruption, redemption, and fate.