‘The Snowtown Murders’ Marks Auspicious Debut For Director, Lead Actors

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HollywoodChicago.com Oscarman rating: 4.0/5.0
Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – With a mixture of brooding unease and morbid fascination, the camera in Justin Kurzel’s fact-based thriller has a tendency to follow characters from behind as they enter a new realm of darkness. It’s the darkness residing outside the dingy walls of a hazardous home in South Australia that draws a damaged young man like a moth to a flame. He’s seeking a father figure, but what he finds is something unspeakable.
 
The young man, Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), is an enigma from the get-go. At age 16, he’s old enough to know that the nude photographs taken of him by his mother’s boyfriend are more than a little inappropriate. Yet he waits for his dangerously clueless mother, Elizabeth (Louise Harris), to discover the news, which prompts her to cross the street (in the first of many memorable tracking shots) and beat the pedophile senseless, just like Ray Liotta in “GoodFellas.” This will be Elizabeth’s first and last act of good sense in the picture.
 
Why didn’t Jamie speak up earlier about the abuse? Perhaps he was too scared and bewildered, or perhaps he was simply resigned to being submissive. In one shocking scene, his burly older half-brother, Troy (Anthony Groves), takes advantage of Jamie’s weaker physicality and rapes him on the floor of their house. It seems as if Jamie’s entire life has been designed to make him susceptible to the advances of predator, and the latest threat comes in the form of Elizabeth’s new boyfriend, John (Daniel Henshall). He seems like a nice enough guy at first, and has a generally cordial nature that allows him to effortlessly ingratiate himself into the family unit. The twinkle in his eye initially appears comforting, but there’s something off about him. He’s all too happy to encourage Jamie and his younger siblings to deface the pedophile’s property in exceedingly unsettling ways. There’s a hardness to his smile in scenes where he leads boisterous conversation among community members, who casually reveal the gruesome methods they would utilize when obtaining justice. It’s the anger of victimized souls and the desperation of their circumstances that leads John to feed off them like a parasite. He sees Jamie as an ideal apprentice for his passion projects and decides to take the form of a protective guardian. And so begins one of the most sordid and unforgettable coming-of-age pictures in recent memory.

Lucas Pittaway and Daniel Henshall star in Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders, an IFC Midnight release.
Lucas Pittaway and Daniel Henshall star in Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders, an IFC Midnight release.
Photo credit: Warp Films Australia Pty Ltd.

Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and the Gold Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film festival, “The Snowtown Murders” boasts startling debuts both in front of and behind the camera. First-time feature director Kurzel proves to have a flawless command of his actors, many of whom have little to no acting experience. Best known for his work in the 2008 TV drama, “Out of the Blue,” Henshall proves to have a galvanizing screen presence in “Snowtown.” He looks like the evil Aussie version of “Office”-era Ricky Gervais, and his unthreatening appearance makes his capacity for violence all the more jarring. It’s John’s calculated compassion for the victims of “sexual deviants” that makes his sociopathic psyche so intriguing. The philosophy of combating sickness with sickness so slickly celebrated on “Dexter” is grounded in frightening reality by Henshall’s intense portrayal. Yet it is the remarkable performance by Pittaway that truly carries the viewer through the increasingly repellant material. His facial expressions are tantamount to the film’s success, and the vulnerability and confusion that he projects never once hits an inauthentic note. Only at the end do his eyes convey little more than an abject hollowness.

The uncompromising bleakness of the material makes the film a bit of a trial to sit through, but Kurzel and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (“Animal Kingdom”) make it difficult for even the most squeamish viewers to look away. There have been few cinematic environments more drained of color and vitality than the overcast landscapes that surround and envelop Kurzel’s directionless characters. Under every supposedly benign image lies the possibility of perversion and malice. I doubt that many scenes in 2012 will be quite as brutally wrenching as John’s cruelly protracted murder of Troy. He forces him to apologize to Jamie before being strangled, yet John elongates the torture to an excruciating degree. His ultimate goal is to goad Jamie into finishing the task, and when the agonized boy finally complies, the resulting moment is utterly heartbreaking.

Daniel Henshall stars in Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders, an IFC Midnight release.
Daniel Henshall stars in Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders, an IFC Midnight release.
Photo credit: Warp Films Australia Pty Ltd.

I’ve withheld discussion of the film’s real-life origins specifically because Shaun Grant’s script works entirely on its own terms. Instead of simply making a lurid exploitation picture (which would’ve been equally at home under the IFC Midnight banner), Grant decided to craft a riveting human story built on the father-son dynamic of serial killers John Bunting and James “Jamie” Vlassakis. I’ll admit that I had no familiarity with the Snowtown (or “Bodies in Barrels”) murders of the ’90s prior to watching the film, and I could’ve lived a perfectly content life without having had that knowledge. But I am grateful to Kurzel and his exemplary cast for telling a cautionary tale that respects its subject matter as much as it respects its audience. Kurzel is a natural born filmmaker and Henshall and Pittaway are actors with very bright futures ahead of them. I eagerly await all their future work, though I do hope that their next projects involve a modicum of laughter and sunshine.

‘The Snowtown Murders’ stars Lucas Pittaway, Daniel Henshall and Louise Harris. It was written by Shaun Grant and directed by Justin Kurzel. It opened March 2 in New York and LA, and is available on Video On Demand. It is not rated.

HollywoodChicago.com staff writer Matt Fagerholm

By MATT FAGERHOLM
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
matt@hollywoodchicago.com

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