[SNOWTOWN
screens Thursday April 26th at 9:00 pm and Saturday April 28th at
9:20 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review by Matt Finley
Australian Director Justin Kerzel’s
debut feature SNOWTOWN is the type of movie that tests
your appreciation of cinema. It’s easy to play the fervent
cinephile when all it means is doe-eyed Dorothy hauling her plaid
over the rainbow or Sheriff Brody blowing Bruce into Lunchables. On
the other hand, the sickening brutality and unrelenting squalor of
Kerzel’s film, a dramatic recounting of serial killer John
Bunting’s monstrous and grotesquely charismatic rampage through the
lives of his victims and accomplices, is liable to paralyze your
popcorn hand midway to the bucket.
Gut-huffing gore hounds and celluloid
daredevils: that’s not meant as a challenge. SNOWTOWN isn’t
a simple visual endurance test obsessed with endlessly escalating
permutations of scenes showing innards turned outards. While the
intermittent violence is unflinching in its cruelty, the film isn’t
shocking for showing a killer’s appetite for violence, but instead
for showing an abused and lonely teenager’s hunger for love and
acceptance, and the lengths he’ll go to fill the emotional vacuum.
Known throughout Australia as,
alternately, the Snowtown Murders (also the title of the film’s US
release) and, more descriptively, the Bodies in Barrels Murders,
Bunting’s crimes are all the more horrifying for having gestated
amid the auspices of justice. After finding out her sons had been
sexually abused by her boyfriend, Elizabeth Harvey (played here by
Louise Harris) invited John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) into her home
on the recommendation of a friend, who told her that Bunting was more
effectual than the police. Bunting formed a neighborhood watch and
declared a McCarthyist war against the suburbs’ seeming infinitude
of suspected homosexuals and pedophiles. As Bunting began dating
Harvey and acting as father to her boys, he and several friends
formed an ad hoc sub-sect of the watch – a cultish death squad into
which he slowly inducted Jaime Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway), Harvey’s
oldest boy, and the film’s protagonist.
While the reenacted murders are
extremely difficult to watch (especially given that these
unimaginable fates befell actual people), almost more unsettling is
the way in which the neighborhood’s prejudice and hatred
inadvertently fuel Bunting’s sick crusade. Heap on top of it his
corruption of 16-year-old Vlassakis and it almost plays like the
pitch black punchline to a wine-dark joke: conscript a man to keep
your children safe from abuse, only to have him turn one of the
innocents into the ultimate abuser. All the while, Kerzel’s
camera drifts between shabby homes, displaced children, and dead
yards littered with porch furniture and bicycles. The languid,
voyeuristic style captures the bleak social reality of Salisbury
North (the working class suburb in which many of the murders took
place), highlighting the sad fact that Bunting didn’t bring unholy
chaos to tranquil order – he offered a perverse, violent order to
existing domestic chaos.
The narrative isn’t strictly linear,
offering momentary glimpses of future disarray, the drifting
camerawork tethered together by the disembodied voices of the
victims, all of whom Bunting forced to record taped messages
declaring their intentions to run away in pursuit of happier lives.
Still, the movie's chronological ambivalence isn’t used toward
building suspense or twisting the narrative into some Nolanesque
riddle. In the same way Jaime Vlassakis is held in sway by the
killer’s wicked charisma, so, too, are we hypnotized by Kerzel’s
grimy tableau, with its portentous flashes of a blood-stained
inevitable and the forced dishonesties of the dead blending
seamlessly into the sorry reality of North Salisbury’s perpetual
squalor. It’s not surprising that Bunting was able to fool a town
into thinking almost a dozen people had fled desperately elsewhere
leaving only a tearful voicemails behind – who would want to stay?
Henshall is alarmingly fantastic as
John Bunting, capturing turn after schizoid turn from step-dad to
bully to killer to friend, but it’s Pittaway’s portrayal of
Vlassakis that makes the film. The actor matches Kerzel’s wandering
camerawork with a similarly lost emotional stupor, embodying a
sadness, rage, dissatisfaction and loneliness that ultimately,
through Bunting’s manipulation, metastasize into a deadly apathy to
which the character cedes free will and morality before following his
surrogate father into monstrosity. (It might be a bit too
dismissively glib to say he reminds me of a beefy Jesse Eisenberg on
Prozac, but there it is. I can’t unwrite it.)
SNOWTOWN is not entertaining.
Even Fincher’s ZODIAC and Joon-Ho Bong’s fantastic
MEMORIES OF MURDER feel lighter – even popcorn-ready - for
taking the perspective of the struggling pursuers rather than the
deranged pursued. Even true crime enthusiasts who revel in works that
peel back the cancerous psychology of sociopaths will be disappointed
– Bunting’s true motives and state of mind are left chillingly
mysterious as the film chooses instead to pathologize the
socio-economic factors that allowed the murderer’s bigoted sadism a
foothold; perhaps his murders wouldn’t have begun (or continued) if
the citizens of Salisbury hadn’t inadvertently built, from their
own ignorance and homophobia, a hateful niche so easily occupied by
fatally maladjusted squatters.
No, SNOWTOWN is not
entertaining, but, as art, it's wholly rewarding - a 120 minute-long
panorama of hell that practically tattoos itself across your memory.
For those of you who are in this for more than just technicolor
fantasy lands or high-seas adventure, that should be more than enough
reason to go. (3 out 4 stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment
We approve all legitimate comments. However, comments that include links to irrelevant commercial websites and/or websites dealing with illegal or inappropriate content will be marked as spam.
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.