Six decades after the aspirational concept of White Man’s Burden was displaced in film with the reality of White Man’s Atrocity, writer/director Jennifer Kent has nowhere to go other than White Man’s Psychopathy. Yet this strongly played horror about colonialism run amuck (British military entitlement breeding murder, racism & revenge) ends up celebrating yet one more noble sacrifice by a principled indigenous native for his great White friend, just about the oldest trope in the Colonial Story Playbook. Well-made as it is, brilliantly so at times, you can’t help seeing Gunga Din in the rearview mirror. Aisling Franciosi is the young mother in the Tasmanian outback (a convict immigrant) whose lovely voice brings her to grief when it attracts the attention of a British officer. Beaten & raped, her husband & infant child brutally murdered in front of her, she’s soon out for revenge, aided by reluctant indigenous guide Baykali Ganambarr (fantastic in his debut) who has his own reasons for payback, but even less hope at surviving long enough to even get a chance. Their slowly building relationship and a series of unlikely, yet believable close calls and opportunities grabbed as they follow the perpetrators to the nearest town often thrilling, usually terrifying. Though the casual, even absurd mistreatment of the aboriginal peoples remains the most shocking. (And that’s saying something after seeing a baby get its head bashed in.) Kent casts throughout with a master’s touch, especially with Sam Claflin as a handsome, perfectly contemptible psychopath), and only seriously errs with a few too many nightmare visualizations.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Kent’s stunning debut: THE BABADOOK/’14. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-babadook-2014.html
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: In many ways, Kent’s walking tour toward ‘the horror, the horror’ of Tasmania settlement reverses the movement and roles of Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS.
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