Tony Scott’s first short movie bears few similarities to his later glossy thrillers (Top Gun (1986) and Days of Thunder (1990), for example), but as an example of an efficient and punchy, folk-horror tinged drama, One of the Missing is exceptional. An adaptation of an Ambrose Bierce short story, the film follows an American civil war soldier on a mission. He stalks his enemies through the backwoods, finds cover in an abandoned farmhouse and then becomes trapped when the house is destroyed. Partially buried under rubble, with his own loaded rifle pinned down and pointing at his face, the man goes slowly mad.

It feels like an equivalent to his brother Ridley’s early film The Duellists (1977), not just in terms of the period setting, but in terms of the lack of polish or affectation – an example of work before the MTV advertising style crept in. Like Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas’s early movies Fear and Desire (1953) and Freiheit (1966), Scott goes for a war setting and focuses on one man, the rawness of the lack of budget and the economic inventiveness of the direction giving it a personal edge. The moment where the man goes mad is notable and slips, perhaps appropriately, onto a level of heightened surrealism that is surprising  effective.

It’s a film that has a sense of place and location; that is tightly constructed and claustrophobically photographed and that suggests a subtle talent that, for me, never quite translated into full length films and was deadened by Hollywood excess.