It stars Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, John Hurt, Danny Huston and David Wenham.

Riding in search of Arthur, Charlie comes to the charred remains of the home where the Burns gang raped pregnant Eliza Hopkins and murdered her and her family.

In town, Eden Fletcher, who hired Stanley to "clean up" the area, orders that Mikey be given one hundred lashes as punishment for the rape and murder of the Hopkins family.

Stanley is aghast at this, as he believes Mikey is not responsible for his actions and the flogging will kill him, and because it will break his deal with Charlie and bring the Burns gang's revenge upon him and his wife.

Stanley sends Sergeant Lawrence away with tracker Jacko and other men to "investigate" the reported slaying of Dan O'Riley (the dead man in the cantina) by a group of Aboriginal people.

Arthur's gang consists of Samuel Stoat, a woman named Queenie who tends to Charlie's wound, and an Aboriginal man called Two-Bob.

Captain Stanley attempts to defend Mikey at gunpoint from the bloodthirsty townspeople but is overruled once Martha arrives and insists on revenge for her dead friends.

The critical consensus states: "Brutal, unflinching, and violent, but thought-provoking and with excellent performances, this Australian western is the one of the best examples of the genre to come along in recent times.

[6] At the Movies critic Margaret Pomeranz called it an "extraordinary film [that] explores the elliptical nature of class, race, colonisation and family.

"[7] Co-host David Stratton thought that The Proposition was "a fascinating depiction of the outback in this period, and I've never seen an Australian film which told what is basically a bushranging story in such an unusual way.

"[8] Roger Ebert, giving it four out of four, described the film as "a movie you cannot turn away from; it is so pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence, that it is a record of those things we pray to be delivered from".

[11] J. R. Jones of the Chicago Reader said: "This Aussie feature perfectly re-creates the charbroiled landscapes and cruel psychodrama of the old Sergio Leone westerns, with John Hurt particularly fine as a raging old mountain goat."

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly opined the film as "a pitiless yet elegiac Australian Western as caked with beauty as it is with blood".

[12] Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal labelled the film "a visionary tale of a fragile civilizing impulse crushed by family loyalty and a lust for revenge in the vast outback of the late 19th century".

[13] Nick Rogers of Suite101.com remarked: "John Hillcoat's violence-probing Western feels as uncompromisingly bleak, royally widescreen and graphically violent as any Sam Peckinpah opus - a sunburned, grimy-nailed saga of point-blank executions and blood wrung from a cat o' nine tails.