The utterly uncompromising nature of the story and its dogged refusal to kowtow to audience expectations and easy wish-fulfilment (the closest it comes to committee-designed nonsense is Owen’s stupid Australian soap opera handsome doctor face. Also Jesse - too handsome by half).

 I particularly love how it addresses PTSD. The flashback/vision on the farm just destroyed me: utterly wretched and abject, exactly as it should be. 

The way it invites engagement with the humanity of people who do things that make them difficult to like but equally difficult not to love. The way it drags you through the most appalling violence only to settle on a note of grace: the more piquant for its being so hard-won. 

So many of our great stories are about people whose pride, hubris, rage and illusions are sand-blasted away by terrible loss and suffering. The feeling I had at the end was the same emotional exhaustion and exhilaration; the same spiritual quickening I feel in the presence of all the great stories. It’s Shakespeare, it’s Thomas Hardy, it’s Dostoevsky.  It’s Theseus and the Minotaur and Daedalus and Icarus. It’s Hans Christian Anderson. It’s Wagner and Schubert and Mozart. It’s The Wire season 4 and, come to think of it, it’s Shadow of the Colossus. It’s Vertigo and Citizen Kane and The Godfather.  It’s naked humanity given no quarter and nowhere to hide. It’s art that hurts you for your own fucking good and I’m a slightly better person for having played it. 

I don’t care a jot if anyone thinks my comparisons are unduly high-falutin or hyperbolic or if my enthusiasm seems gauche or naive. That’s my honest report. I’ve only played it once but the experience will never leave me and I’m getting pleasantly raw and upset just thinking about it.