I left the screening of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto feeling exhausted. I walked home with a knot in my stomach and images of human suffering lodged in my mind like bits of shrapnel. I began to wonder: is Gibson the most masterful sadist in the cinema today? He delights in tormenting his audience by showing the torments of the flesh. In his last film, The Passion of the Christ, Jesus died for our sins; in Apocalypto, the innocent die for our entertainment. Gibson doesn’t tug at your heart strings — he tears them out and whips you with them for more than two hours. The result is something repellent and remarkable.

Still, you have to hand it to Mad Mel: he has balls. He makes a big, expensive film — about a jungle tribe during the decline of the Mayan civilisation — with no stars, and he shoots it in a Yucatec Maya dialect. But then balls are very much a feature of Apocalypto. The film opens with a scene about eating the testicles of an animal and goes on to a protracted joke about a man and his infertility. In one sense, Apocalypto is about what happens to a civilisation that loses its balls and gives in to fear. Clearly, Gibson has taken the film’s message to heart: be not afraid.

Apocalypto opens with a group of male hunters chasing a tapir through the jungle. One of the men is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a handsome young hunter who will become the hunted. He’s a practical joker and loving father with a pregnant wife and small son. The peaceful existence of his tribe is destroyed one dawn when another tribe, led by the fearsome-looking Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo), attacks the small village. They tie up the men and women, then burn the village. Fortunately, Jaguar has stashed away wife and child down a nearby hole. But before he is led off into the jungle, he sees that the vine that would enable his loved ones to climb out has been cut by one of the raiders.

The enslaved tribesmen are marched off through the jungle to a once great Mayan city that now resembles hell on earth: it’s a place ravaged by famine, starvation, sickness and decadence. Decapitated heads roll down great flights of stairs for the delight of the starving masses. Here Jaguar and his fellow captives are to be used as human sacrifices.

The question that has us hanging on the edge of our seats is: will Paw be able to break free and get back in the nick of time to save his wife and child? Paw is engaged in the same quest Gibson undertook in his film The Patriot. That, too, was about an ordinary man who must become extraordinary in order to save his family. So what we have here is a straightforward race-against-time action picture. But it’s done with such visual power and emotional intensity, it’s in a class of its own.

It’s also relentless. It keeps pounding away with one harrowing and horrifying image and scene after another. The sight of the weeping children as they watch their parents being dragged away is just one of the many agonising moments. Most directors would have made the audience suffer a certain amount, then rushed to the payback moment when the hero wreaks his revenge; but not Gibson. He makes you wait... and wait ... and ... wait.

As with many of his films, there have been plenty of complaints about the accuracy of the script. Maybe he has got the odd detail wrong concerning cave paintings and who the Mayans used in their human sacrifices. But what he does brilliantly is take you back in time, place you inside the drama of a native tribe and make you feel as if you are really there.

The whole film looks authentic; it smells authentic.

This is partly down to his use of native language and his decision to put unknowns in key roles. But the quality of the cast is remarkable. Youngblood conveys the strength and terrible suffering of his character with total conviction, while Trujillo’s Zero Wolf is one of the scariest villains we have seen on the screen for a long while.

There have also been complaints that Gibson’s portrayal of the tribesmen is “racist”. But he manages to make Jaguar Paw and his friends both exotic and familiar. They are not savages, but neither are they are some idealised jungle tribe blessed with ancient tribal wisdom that we modern westerners can all learn from. And what a nice change to see that, when it came to the cruelty of slavery, white Europeans didn’t have a monopoly.

As a no-nonsense thriller, Apocalypto works superbly. However, Gibson couldn’t leave it at that. He has to bring some bigger idea to the table — and that’s the claim that this film is a kind of wake-up call to us so-called enlightened moderns, who need to see the parallels between the collapse of Mayan civilisation and the impending collapse of our own. But the one gaping hole in the film is any kind of coherent or convincing explanation for the decline and fall of the Mayans. Gibson also doesn’t make clear the connection between then and now, other than some hazy stuff about greed and ecological waste.

That said, I have to admit that Apocalypto is the most fantastic film I never want to see again.

Apocalypto, Four stars
18, 138 mins

Apocalypto opens on Friday