By Sandra Hall
THE MOOGAI ★★★
(M) 97 minutes
In Indigenous filmmaker Jon Bell’s new horror movie, the Moogai serves as monster and metaphor. It’s a spirit that steals children, a crime that evokes instant comparisons with the Australian authorities responsible for removing generations of Aboriginal children from their parents to place them in the unreliable care of the state.
Shari Sebbens in The Moogai, one of the first supernatural horror movies with a First Nations director.Credit: Elise Lockwood
Sarah Bishop (Shari Sebbens) was one of these children – taken from her mother, Ruth (Tessa Rose), as a newborn to be fostered by a white couple. However, this makes her one of the more fortunate of these stolen infants. Her foster parents, Annette and Martin (Tara Morice and Nic Cassim), turned out to be kind and loving, and she’s grown up to become a successful lawyer with a happy marriage and a child.
This means she regards Ruth’s reappearance in her life as a mixed blessing. Although she wanted to meet her, she was unprepared for the reality. With Ruth’s traditional beliefs and devotion to Aboriginal culture, she is often at odds with the life Sarah has made for herself.
At this point, Bell’s script seems to be shaping up as a story wrapped firmly around the conflict between mother and daughter, but it soon becomes clear he has a much more complex scenario in mind: a domestic drama-cum-political horror movie decorated with all the nightmarish flourishes that can be had from a well-furnished visual effects department.
Jahdeana Mary (left) as Chloe, Shari Sebbens as Sarah Bishop and Tessa Rose as Ruth in The Moogai.
The Moogai comes into Sarah’s life after she suffers cardiac shock during the birth of her second baby and almost dies. As soon as she’s home again, the hallucinations and the nightmares start and life becomes a battle to keep the monster from taking her new baby.
For a while, the metaphor works, suggesting the Moogai and the white establishment are coming together in an unholy alliance. The more upset Sarah becomes, the more unbalanced she seems, until her doctors begin to doubt her ability to look after the baby and her young daughter, Chloe (Jahdeana Mary). Even her husband, Fergus (Meyne Wyatt), is persuaded that a short spell in a psych ward might be a good idea. Only Ruth – predictably enough – divines the truth.
Bell is a skilled and experienced screenwriter. He worked on the TV series Redfern Now and Cleverman, but this script plays as if it’s been crafted to fit a pre-ordained conclusion. It doesn’t give the actors enough time or space to embellish their characters with the kind of touches that can bring them fully to life and invite you to believe they could lead an existence beyond the confines of the screen. And Sebbens’ performance hits the histrionic heights so early in the action that she has nothing left for the climax.
The monster itself is quite an accomplishment – achieved by actor Paul Chamberlain with some impressive prosthetics work – but the boom in horror movie-making has made us pretty blasé about the grotesque creations the genre can conjure up. Unfortunately, this well-intentioned film isn’t as scary as it’s trying to be.
The Moogai is released in cinemas on October 31.
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