Below (2020) - Movie Review

In the near future, Britain has gone from merely being one of the most powerful monarchies in the world to being the ruler. Any news media that doesn’t conform has been deemed illegal. And in the heart of Australia, state lines have been redrawn to make way for refugee detention centres, so that they can be on the mainland while technically not being located in Australia. It is one of these centres that serves as the main setting for this film, and holy shit, is this a film that needed to be made.

After covering Ryan Corr for so many years, it’s really damn gratifying to see him give this level of a performance; might be my favourite of his so far. As seedy Dark Web grifter Dougie, who gets roped into working at a centre by his step-dad (played with disquieting strength by Anthony LaPaglia), he is precisely the kind of roguish cunt that’s needed for a story this dark from end to end. The energy, his way with the dialogue, how smoothly he handles his character arc; he serves as a captivating nucleus for what is a pitch-black satire of Australia’s dirty little secret: Our involvement with offshore detention centres.

Right from the off, the people who work in the centre as well as the institution that built it are shown with crystal clarity in just how fucked-up, but also funny, but also fucked-up they are. The introduction scene of LaPaglia’s Terry threatening an inmate’s family, only to learn that the family’s death is why the inmate is currently about to light himself on fire, sets the tone for just how messed-up, yet necessary, the rest of the film is. As a depiction of a particularly vile practice, it highlights a lot of the doublethink required for this behaviour to be accepted (or, more accurately, wilfully ignored), while also showing how the language used to describe said practice shows a higher level of fucks-given for optics than human lives.

Said lack of fucks-given also shows in what can charitably be considered the action of this film: Illegal cage fights between refugees. Yeah, this goes full Fight Club at times, with Dougie broadcasting them for profit on the Dark Web, and it’s honestly the weakest part of the whole film, visually-speaking. Not that it’s even that bad (although with all the speed-ramping and jittery editing, there’s an argument to be made); just that it doesn’t function as spectacle. The story knows that this is all fucking gross and makes it all look as unappealing as possible, even on accident.

It’s because of those little touches, like with how remarkably subtle the world-building is for what is essentially a low-key cyberpunk future in the making, that the film’s bigger ambitions for satire ring true. On top of being genuinely quite funny (in that pitch-black, “I’m uncomfortable but I can’t help myself” kind of way), the barbs it throws at the utter lack of empathy at the heart of this whole mess hit really damn close to home. It even wins bonus points in that it refrains from any political partisanship, since the real-world examples of Aussie-backed detention centres seem to have plenty of detractors from both sides and this is a message worth reaching as many people as possible. This film is the kind of uncompromising satire that needs to exist around this kind of behaviour, and I’m honestly really happy that it exists.