Zac Efron’s outback nightmare in new Aussie thriller movie Gold

“It ain’t no f--king joke out here.” That’s the ­caution from one unnamed stranger in the slow-burn Australian survival thriller Gold.

Zac Efron in Gold

Gold (M)

Stan

Three and a half stars

“It ain’t no f--king joke out here.” That’s the ­caution from one unnamed stranger (Anthony Hayes) to another unnamed stranger (Zac Efron) in the slow-burn Australian survival thriller Gold.

He’s right. This striking movie, filmed in outback South Australia, has four main characters: the two men, an unnamed woman (Susie Porter) and the unforgiving landscape. The American star is not in Baywatch any more.

Unforgiving yet generous, at least to the filmmakers. A scene involving a sandstorm did not require the sand and fans that had been trucked in for the shoot, as a real one happened and the cameras rolled.

It is a stunning sequence, with Efron in the middle of it. It’s a credit to cinematographer Ross Giardina, and to mother nature. So is an aerial shot of a makeshift desert camp. As the camera moves higher and the camp becomes smaller, what we see could be in the Australian desert, or on the moon.

This two-hour movie, made for the streaming service Stan, is directed by Hayes, and written by Hayes and his wife and writing partner Polly Smyth. The dialogue is as spare and hard as the skeletal ground on which the men walk and that feels right.

An opening caption tells us the setting is Some Time. Some Place. Not Far From Now …

A man (Efron) alights from a freight train. He’s bearded, has scars on his face, walks with a limp and looks like he hasn’t had a bath in weeks.

When he uses a fly-infested toilet and then splashes water on his face, another man (Hayes) rebukes him. “It isn’t a goddamn beauty spa. Don’t waste water.”

It’s a wry moment, given Efron’s usual pretty boy looks.

The second man is there to drive the newcomer to “the compound”, where hard manual work is available. We hear snippets from the truck radio – words such as “freedom fighters” – that suggest civilisation has collapsed or is on the brink of doing so.

The truck breaks down in the middle of ­nowhere; the newcomer moves off to take a leak and finds a lump of gold that makes the Welcome Stranger look like a pebble.

The two men try to dig it up but cannot. After some argument it’s agreed the newcomer will guard the gold while the other drives to a place where he can get hold of an excavator. The trip will take at least five days.

This decision sets up the rest of the film. The newcomer, who comes from “the west”, is not hardened to bush life.

He has limited food and water and, importantly, no gun. He has to face the sun, the storms, the endless flies, snakes, scorpions and a pack of wild dogs that circle the camp.

The greatest fear, however, is that other people will turn up and take the gold. This is where the unnamed woman (Porter) comes in.

When she walks into the camp, speaking with an English accent and asking the man question after question, it’s possible she’s real, a hallucination or a bit of both.

He declines her offer of some dried snake. “You’re a nervous little f--ker, aren’t you?” she decides.

What happens between them is one of the twists that take this compelling tale of greed and survival to a stark place. The chosen ending is a gutsy bit of filmmaking.

The other Australian movie I have reviewed this week, Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, opens with a Nick Cave song. This film, which continues Efron’s move into grittier roles, ends with one: People Ain’t No Good.

Nick Cave’s 1994 song Red Right Hand must be one of the most in-demand pieces of music for the screen. It’s been in everything from the American comedy of idiots Dumb and Dumber to the British gangster series Peaky Blinders.

It pops up early in the Australian zombie movie Wyrmwood: Apocalypse. It works well as a scene-setter – who is the vengeful God in this post-apocalyptic paradise lost? – but I think The Beatles’ A Day in the Life would work even better.

“Wake up, fall out of bed/shoot a zombie in the head.” This is how Australian soldier Rhys (Luke McKenzie) starts every day.

He lives alone in an electrified compound.

To drive to work he must first blast the zombies clinging to his front gate.

His job is to go out in his armoured ute, collect zombies and deliver them to a bunker run by his colonel (Jake Ryan) and a surgeon-general (Nicholas Boshier). He’s only a corporal so he has to be a “good little soldier”, as the colonel puts it, and do as ordered.

However, he starts to have doubts about what the colonel and doctor are up to.

Are they working on a cure to the virus that has turned Australia into Walking Dead Down Under, or are they up to something more nefarious?

This 90-minute movie answers that question but not until there’s been a fair whack of brain chomping and zombie splattering, including of Review’s deputy editor, Bridget Cormack, who has a small role as one of the undead.

The result is an outlandish, humorous and entertaining schlocker that nods to Mad Max, Peter Jackson’s 1987 debut Bad Taste and, even earlier, Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston, from 1973.

This film is a sequel to Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, the 2014 debut of the Roache-Turner brothers Kiah (director and screenwriter) and Tristan (screenwriter).

Siblings are central to the story.

Several of the original cast return, including Bianca Bradey as Brooke, who is a hybrid, part human, part zombie, and Jay Gallagher as her hard-arse brother Barry.

Once a photographer and a mechanic respectively, they are now considered terrorists or revolutionaries, depending on who’s looking.

Two new characters, played by Indigenous actors Shantae Barnes-Cowan and Tasia Grace (the ABC TV series Mystery Road), are scene stealers as sisters who are fighting to the death to survive in this wasteland.

And Rhys, we are told, lost a twin brother not long after the apocalypse was triggered by a meteor shower.

That celestial starting point goes to the Book of Revelation: the wormwood star that poisons the Earth’s water.

At one point Rhys does go a bit biblical, confesses he has sold his soul and vows, “I got to make this right”.

Barry’s response returns us to this film’s first and perhaps only commandment: “F..ken A!”