Looks like I missed the boat on making this a timely review, innit? Yeah, it’s a few days late, but with how much lockdown has slowed everything down to a crawl, time and seasons don’t mean as much as they have in previous years, so I think we can let a minor lapse through without much fuss. Besides, after the shocker I just got done reviewing, I’m in need of some bloody good cheer right now. And not only did I find it with this little ripper, it might be one of the best examples of a somewhat darker Christmas movie that doesn’t involve the words “Bad” or “Santa”.
Okay, this does involve a criminal dressing up as Santa as part of a larger scheme, here being Daryl (Daniel Henshall) travelling to an outback farm where he stashed away his loot from a robbery. And man, is Daniel a beaut in this role. He’s Ocker as all hell, he handles both the emotional and humourous dialogue with equal vigour, and there’s something about how readily he bullshits explanations for things to just about everyone around him that warms the part of me that treats improv as a way of life.
And on the note of the various lies he doles out, we have the requisite precocious children in attendance as well, with Hazel (Tatiana Goode) as something of a surrogate parent as their mother (Ling Cooper Tang) is still in mourning for their father, Tom (Eadan McGuinness) who is a helmet-wearing hypochondriac, and Daisy (Lena Nankivell), a small girl who regularly fires a shotgun into the air to try and hit a cloud to make it rain. As precious as some of this schtick gets, the honest writing from Timothy Walker and Elliot & Gretel Vella keep all this good and grounded, even managing to keep a steady stream of laughs along the way.
This is also an incredibly Aussie production; it’s the kind
of film designed for people who refer to Christmas as ‘Chrissy’ because, as Arj
Barker put it best, we’re too laidback as a country to bother with full names
for things, so we just chop the word in half and pop a farkin’ Y on the end of it. Set in rural South Australia, with the threat of property
possession and forced relocation looming over the family throughout (a recurring narrative in Aussie fiction, as well as our national history), with
recurring mentions of bushfires and even pandemics. There’s even a reference to when ScoMo brought a lump of coal into Parliament.
But more so than anything all that recent, the main theme going on here is, weirdly enough for films like this, the moral of Christmas itself as the Christians celebrate it. The birth of a soul so pure that he would go on to deliver salvation to all mankind, before the corporatocracy made it into a spending event and excuse to reconnect with family members you only see once a year for a reason. Here, that translates into Daryl trying to repent for his past mistakes (like the reason behind his sleeve tattoo) and get Hazel and her family out of a tight spot, but there’s also the Big Bad of the movie to consider: Sullivan Stapleton as Dingo.
Dingo is basically the ultimate caricature of “keep the
Christ in Christmas”, guided by what he presumes to be signs from God that he
should indeed kill this man to get his money. Aside from being quite
intimidating as it is, with his wrestler-ready physique, his constant
pointing-out of Biblical names of the people he tries to squeeze for
information on Daryl’s whereabouts basically shows up El Camino Christmas at the
religious parallel game without even trying that much. He's like a walking embodiment of how hard a lot of films try to be to-the-letter with holiday films, which further highlights the finesse behind the messaging in this one.
It really says something about our culture when this fits into the category of a family film, but that’s accurate to the tone of it all. The Aussie love of four-letter words and crime capers is very present, but it’s also quite uplifting and fun and in the spirit of the season. It’s a fantastic sit, and while I can almost-guarantee that locals will take more of a shine to this than others, it’s got enough charm and good-hearted humour for me to recommend this to those others all the same.
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