Snowtown

A+

Scruffy world of an irredeemable underclass which finds release in drugs, booze, prayer meetings, and rabble-rousing kitchen gatherings.

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Australian directors continue to excel at suspenseful timing, as Justin Kurzel proves with Snowtown, his debut 2010 feature that's a terrifying movie based on two books about Australia's worst serial killer, John Bunting.

He and his pals' ten victims lived in the suburban slums of Adelaide in the 1990s, in a squalor populated by fundamentalist and homophobic white trash. The docudrama, written by another newbie, Shaun Grant, focuses on Bunting's domineering relationships with a divorced woman and her three under-educated maladjusted teenage sons. He grooms the oldest (16) to become another of his murderous accomplices, pursuing the boy's soul with mesmerising empathetic stares.

Bunting is played brilliantly by the movie's sole professional actor, Daniel Henshall, who'd previously only made a few TV series episodes. Short, stocky, bearded and amiable, he smiles intensively, eyes glinting hypnotically, and it's only on the rare occasions when Bunting loses his cool that his menacing and amoral character is revealed. The rest of the time, he's exercising a quietly effective, controlling personality.

The family he moves into, and its neighbours, are easily-controlled social misfits, some mentally disturbed, some on drugs, mostly surviving on welfare benefits and petty crime. They are depressingly nasty bigots or weak-minded fools, and it becomes clear that Bunting tolerates a local cross-dressing middle-aged homosexual mainly as a source of potential victims.

Bunting's new teenage disciple (played movingly well as a tearful, passive schizophrenic by first-time actor Lucas Pittaway) is the lead to a step-brother who'd raped the boy when he was younger. There's also a palpable tension in the teenager's relationship with Bunting, in which the boy seeks a family role model while Bunting's eyes suggest the killer may be failing to acknowledge his own desires.

The opening urban scenes set the mood and style frighteningly well, as the boys' mother leaves a male neighbour to house-sit with them and he orders the blank-faced kids to strip naked for photographs. Bunting's arrival on the scene soon after begins with him showing the teenager how to cut heads, limbs and tails off newly-shot kangaroos in the back yard. The blood-stained scraps are thrown at the paedophile's bungalow.

Theirs is the muddy, scruffy world of an irredeemable underclass which finds release in drugs, booze, prayer meetings, and rabble-rousing kitchen gatherings reviewing the grisliest ways to punish perverts. This isn't the admirably brave-faced and amusingly-confused working class characters who populate the sets of Mike Leigh and sentimental neo-realists. This is the ugly reality of human failures, characters which a Bunting can feel superior to, manipulate and kill.

Most of the killings take place off-screen, between scenes, and their details and sequence will only be clear if a viewer reads about them in Wikipedia. The one motive for them - fraudulent use of victims' credit cards and benefits - is only hinted at once; Bunting and his three older associates are never shown with jobs, and Bunting guides the boy's enrolment for the dole.

The pace of the editing (and a nerve-jangling musical soundtrack of metallic banging and electronic sounds) amplify the tension, because a viewer's never sure what type of scene will appear next and how draining it will be. The only elongated murder scene, in a bath, is presented with hand-held objectivity, augmenting its almost unbearably vivid impact.

Less positively, several scenes are mysteriously non-linear non-sequitors. Bunting and the teenager shave each other's heads, but are not seen bald-headed again, except once when only Bunting is. Another time, Bunting bullies the boy into shooting Bunting's own dog, but plays with the dog in a subsequent scene. The scenes jut out of the movie, looking like a cluster of deleted scenes that got spliced in arbitrarily to create a two-hour feature.

At the end too, there's a collage of finely photographed images of urban ugliness that appears gratuitous. The ending itself is an abrupt halt, a door firmly shut, suggesting that the teenager has become a cold-hearted tear-less killer too.

End credits then note the prison terms being served by the killers, giving the audience no fairy-tale closure to a human horror show. As a debut movie, though, this is a winner for Kurzel.