Snowtown (2011)

Directed by: Justin Kurzel

1998, Snowtown, South Australia.  Divorced working-class mum Elizabeth Harvey (Louise Harris) asks her neighbour (and potential befriend) to look after her boys one evening, and he rewards her trust by sexually abusing them.  His continued presence across the road serves as a threatening taunt to her clan, so when John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) arrives on this scene, riding a motorbike, he looks to the family like a knight in shining armour.  Soon he’s harassing the paedophile from the neighbourhood and organising kitchen meetings of wannabe vigilantes to plan campaigns against local abusers, real and supposed.

To vulnerable 18 year-old Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) he’s a hero and the father figure he is seeking.  But Bunting has his own secrets, which extend to torturing and murdering people, and (incompetently) disposing of the remains in vats of acid.  Using a mixture of carrot and stick, Jamie is soon recruited to Bunting’s motley crew. At first he is more of a fellow-traveller, helping to shift equipment and body-parts. His own initiation into murder comes when he delivers the coup-de-grace at the end of a gruesomely depicted torture/execution of his own half-brother (whom we have earlier seen raping Jamie). From then on, he participates with varying degrees of fear, enthusiasm and numbness.

This approximately true story is remarkable in a number of ways.  Its portrayal of the influence that a psychopath can wield over a young, impressionable man is as repellent as it is believable, and the savage depictions of the killings exerts a horrible fascination, too. The cast is largely non-professional, which gives the proceedings an uncanny authenticity, and the film-stock’s colour cast suggests grimy home-movie.  There’s a powerful, sometimes disturbing soundtrack, though one complaint is that the actors’ voices are often indistinct, making relationships hard to figure out.  Nevertheless, an impressive if sometimes ghoulish movie.