The real story of what happened in the Snowtown murders in South Australia in the early 1990s is practically unfilmable. Showing what John Bunting and his accomplices actually did to their victims would be unwatchable, so this film does not try. The violence is largely implied.
There are a few scenes that stand in for the many and they are hard to watch - but they need to be. They could also have been much worse. Shaun Grant's excellent script concentrates on the why, rather than the how, and that makes this a compelling and important Australian film.
It is not perfect. The storytelling is sometimes confusing, the geography likewise. I'm not sure if debut director Justin Kurzel intended this or not. He does not introduce characters so much as stumble upon them. People appear and disappear without explanation, probably because that's what really happened.
The killing becomes so unpredictable we are never sure who is going to be next. A couple of flashbacks further confuse things. Some of this may be a way of unsettling the audience but some of it is just sloppy.
Lucas Pittaway as Jamie and Daniel Henshell as John Bunting.
None of that matters when we consider what the film does well. Snowtown gives a plausible account of how such a thing could happen, which is a hard and important thing to do. As well as being unfilmable, the story of the multiple bodies in the barrels in the bank in Snowtown was just so unfathomable.
These crimes were committed by four people - and they're just the ones who survived. Bunting had a tendency to murder those who had helped him to murder, so the actual number involved was higher.
How could such a thing happen? The script takes us through it in small steps, the only possible strategy. It feels like the result of a lot of research, not just into the characters but the places where these events happened.
Kurzel grew up in Gawler, about 10 minutes from Salisbury North, in Adelaide's northern suburbs, where most of the murders took place and he's sympathetic to the people who live there. The film is about whether killers are created by nature or nurture, so environment is important.
Reign of terror ... Daniel Henshall as serial killer John Bunting.
The streets are familiar from other recent Australian films. These are the poor outer suburbs of any major Australian city, as in The Boys or Little Fish. Bored children ride bicycles in shopping centres or play endless video games. Their parents use poker machines the same way in dispiriting clubs and pubs.
Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) lives with his mother Elizabeth (Louise Harris) in public housing. He has two younger brothers and an older stepbrother, Troy (Anthony Groves), whose visits are infrequent and disruptive. Elizabeth is lonely, which makes her vulnerable to the attentions of her neighbour Jeffrey (Frank Cwertniak).
When she is out, he photographs the three younger boys in their underwear. That's how John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) comes into her life. He orchestrates the campaign of harassment that drives Jeffrey out of the neighbourhood. He hates paedophiles and homosexuals and he encourages Jamie, who is only 16, to stand up and ''become a man''.
Elizabeth is happy to have a strong man around the house, someone who will protect the children and herself. He even cooks. Bunting is affectionate with Alex (Marcus Howard), the smallest child, and attentive to Jamie.
He teaches him how to ride a motorcycle and shoot a gun. Some of his friends are a little scary but that's nothing unusual in this neighbourhood.
Bunting begins to agitate and organise, dressing his hatreds up as community action. Neighbours gather in Elizabeth's kitchen to rail against the ''poofters'', flashers and child molesters. He ramps up the rhetoric, as if to validate what he's planning. He keeps challenging Jamie, who has his own reserves of hurt: what are you going to do about these bludgers?
We don't see how the killing begins or how the relationship works between Bunting and Robert Wagner (Aaron Viergever), his chief accomplice. We do see how Bunting manipulates people, with fear and persuasion, to follow him into dark places.
Henshall's performance as Bunting is brilliant, partly because he's so ordinary. He's not like some of the other vicious killers in Australian films - David Wenham in The Boys or Ben Mendelsohn in Animal Kingdom.
They were frightening from the moment we met them but Bunting wants to be seen as ''a good bloke'' with a strong sense of duty. He knows he's a stone motherless killer but he enjoys getting others to do the things he imagines. That's the terrifying lesson of this movie - it's not that it was so hard to make these men do what they did, but so easy.
SNOWTOWN
Directed by Justin Kurzel
Rated MA, 120 minutes