Snowtown murders movie is hard to watch
JUSTIN Kurzel's debut feature Snowtown is one of the most powerful and fascinating Australian films of the year. It's also one of the hardest to watch.
JUSTIN Kurzel's debut feature Snowtown is one of the most powerful and fascinating Australian films of the year.
It's also one of the hardest to watch.
Made on a low budget, with a cast of non-actors drawn from Adelaide's northern suburbs, the psychological film transcends its limitations to become an engrossing study of how and why the depraved "bodies in the barrels" murders came about.
The 16mm cinematography makes the most of the unkempt suburbs and the soundtrack by Kurzel's brother Jed evokes an ominous atmosphere.
Like the world-beating Animal Kingdom, Snowtown features a young man drawn into a world of criminal violence by older men.
It's told through the eyes of Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) who, at 16, lives with his mother in a forgotten community of sexual assaults, unemployment, hopelessness and violence.
Early on Jamie is abused by his neighbour, later he's raped by his half brother. That seems why he so readily accepts the charismatic John Bunting (Daniel Hanshall) as a father figure, when he arrives from Queensland to take up with Jamie's mum.
Bunting sets about solving his problems, hounding the neighbour out of his home and setting up meetings where parents rage about the horrible things they'd like to inflict on paedophiles. Little do they know, Bunting has already begun doing so in a rampage of torture and murder.
The audience is left to piece all this together - we're given only as much information as Jamie - and have to work out what's going on when people start "moving interstate".
Eventually Jamie becomes intimately involved, luring victims and even reluctantly participating in a murder.
In seeking to understand his actions, the film will no doubt be accused of inviting sympathy for convicted murderer Jamie and his mum Liz.
Henshall is terrific as Bunting, playing him as someone who can fake being an ordinary bloke who is equally at home as a family man cooking dinner as he is as an executioner who derives sick pleasure from his victims' screams. His charisma helps explain how he was able to persuade others to join in the violence, but we're not really given an insight into why he does it.
Most of the violence is off screen, and the one murder that is shown is so horrible, that any more would turn the film into torture porn.
Like a car crash, Snowtown is hard to watch and even harder to look away from. It's never less than compelling and it's very well made. But dealing with such a difficult and confronting subject, it's also hard to recommend .
READ THE FIRST INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR JUSTIN KURZEL IN SA WEEKEND