Rosamund Pike says Hostiles is an existential film with a simple story. "I didn't think of this as a genre film. The story is quite simple and yet there's so much. The human landscape of it is vast. There's tremendous interplay between these characters. They've all seen such darkness and it's affected them in different ways," she says.

Directed by Scott Cooper, the film also stars Q'orianka Kilcher, Adam Beach, Rory Cochrane, Ben Foster, Jesse Plemons, Jonathan Majors and Timothee Chalamet.

Cooper praised Pike, who plays character of Rosalee Quaid in the film. "She has such a high emotional IQ. She's an actor who always wants to take the character from one stage to something completely unexpected. She's thinking at every moment of how she'll relate to something that's six, eight or ten minutes down the narrative," he adds.

Set in 1892, Hostiles stars Christian Bale as a captain who agrees to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) and his family back home to tribal lands. The journey takes Bale and his detail from New Mexico to the grasslands of Montana.

The film, based on an original manuscript by the late Donald Stewart, is scheduled for release in India this Friday.