The plot: On her way to a party, teenager Vicki (Ashleigh
Cummings) is picked up by suburban couple Evelyn (Emma Booth) and John (Stephen
Curry), who offer her a lift. However, they don’t take her to the party; they
take to the same place they took the last few strays they picked up from the
side of the road: Shackled to a bed in their home. Turns, Evelyn and John’s
sexual tastes lean to the more… adventurous, and if she wants to make it out
alive, she’ll have to figure out how to turn the tables against her captors.
Along with it being nice to see Ashleigh
Cummings in a movie again so soon after Pork Pie, it’s also rather gratifying to see
her absolutely nail her character.
She’s the film’s main victim and she sells the pain and abject terror very
well, but its smaller moments, the ones where she tries to appeal to the
humanity in her captors, that she shows off what she’s really capable of. Susie
Porter as her mother gives an emotionally powerful performance here, hitting
the quiet and loud moments with equal intensity, and Damian De Montemas as her
father brings home some of the bigger themes of the story.
But it’s with the main couple that the real magic starts to
happen, starting with Stephen Curry (no, not the American basketball player) as
far less of a human and more a beast wearing a human’s skin. Knowing his
background in Aussie comedy and even being part of some of our national
cinema’s crowning moments, I legit never would have guessed that this guy was
capable of being this terrifying. And
then there’s Emma Booth, who arguably is actually the main character of the
film. With how non-verbal a lot of the film is to begin with, she does
amazingly well at delivering so many conflicting and often confronting emotions
through only a few glances. This is one of those rare performances that
suddenly make me give a shit about awards ceremonies, because she flat-out deserves to win Best Actress.
Thankfully, she did; some things in this world still make sense.
As much as seeing Australian directors make it
big in the global film industry fills me with a certain amount of pride,
there’s always been this aspect of… well, there’s no other way to put it: Selling
out. Look at some of the more celebrated films made by Aussies: Mad Max: Fury Road, Highlander (the first one, at least), even the works of Joel Edgerton
like The Gift; all terrific films, but you wouldn’t have immediately guessed
that they came from a very distinct cultural background. Hell, even with the
under-the-radar flicks I’ve covered on here like Lead Me Astray, there’s still
that feeling of taking on outside influences. Enter this film, which is
absolutely soaked in 80’s Aussie kitsch. The Western Australian suburbs, the
vernacular, the traces of cultural cringe involving the so-called ‘upper-middle
class Australiana’; so much of this feels like it only could have come from one
place. The film even opens on a scene of teenagers playing netball, one of
the most decidedly Aussie things a film could start with.
I highlight all of this not just out of a sense
of national pride, but rather to draw attention to how mundane this all feels
to a local audience. No joke, after I finished the film, I looked outside my
bedroom window to see the same collection of trees, fences and homogenized
architecture that is so prominent in this film. It’s grounded in a very
definite realm of reality, retro though it may be, which makes the events that take
place feel even more unsettling. It takes the usual approach of suburban horror
in that it emphasizes the mundane to highlight the shocking, making how
domestic everything looks work to the film’s advantage when it gets to showing
what the Whites do with their victims (Wow, that’s an accidentally loaded
sentence). I say that but, in all honesty, we aren’t actually shown all that much. We get a hefty dose
of grit and slime coating the action, but the film ends up implying rather than
being graphic. When dealing with physical, sexual and even psychological abuse,
this method is usually advisable, but it works especially well here at showing
just how vile these actions are… and how close they could be to the local
audience.
Not that this is just cruelty for its own sake;
far bloody from it. Writer/director Ben Young, on his first feature-length
outing, shows tremendous skill with visuals, him and DOP Michael McDermott uses
some very nifty slow-mo shots to bring out the dread in semi-modern suburbia.
But he also shows a definite skill in scripting too, as this is one of those
films where everything we are shown has an absolute reason to be here. Even if
it’s as simple a reason as explaining why this film is set during Christmas,
all of what is shown here feels like it is part of a bigger puzzle with all the
pieces intact. And what is that puzzle a picture of? Well, more so than a look
at the psychology of serial killers, it’s a look at how even the most
“ordinary” of relationships can be hideously toxic. This is where me calling
Evelyn the real main character starts to make a bit more sense, as her
relationship is juxtaposed with that of Vicki’s parents to show a lot of vulgar
behaviour patterns that persist in both examples.
Even further than that, the
film also looks into the effects that such relationships can cause, not just
for those involved but also for the children born from those couplings as well.
It highlights how broken couplings can end up driving those closest away, right
into even worse scenarios. Even though this film technically came out last
year, starting out on the festival circuit in Europe before making its debut
over here, it feels fitting that we’re getting this kind of commentary in 2017.
After all the nonsensical “won’t somebody please think of the children?!”
arguments I’ve been seeing pretty much all year in connection to the marriage
equality debate we’re only now seeing the back-end of, it’s a nice reminder
that this overtly precious idealizing of traditional relationships? Maybe it’s
not as pristine as these cretins would have us believe.
All in all, this is a film that I seriously hope is the
start of a fruitful career for writer/director Ben Young. The acting is
incredible, with Emma Booth and Stephen Curry giving some of the best
performances I’ve covered all year, the visuals show a preternatural mastery of
the elements to wring the eerie out of the norm, the song picks are quite
choice (Carol Of The Bells gets used in the perfect
context here, showing it for the fundamentally creepy song that it is) and the
writing uses certain genre conventions to do some real damage on looking at the
makeups and breakups of abusive relationships. And to top it all off, this
whole package is Aussie as fuck in its aesthetic, showing that local filmmakers
don’t need to abandon their roots to deliver truly intense cinema.
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