In bringing the story of Snowtown to the screen Kurzel, and his director of photography Adam Arkapaw, have created a modern masterpiece of non-sensationalist malice, and menace.
In the 1990s in South Australia John Bunting became possibly the most notorious serial killer in Australias history, but the relative brevity of that countrys history doesnt make Bunting a member of the lower pantheon of infamous killers. The horror inflicted by Bunting, as portrayed in Snowtown, is so darkly demented it makes you wonder why he isnt more widely known. Then again, after watching this searing and unflinching look at philosophical psychopathy you may be thankful that youve never heard of him. Played out in the mundane, depressed, dysfunctional suburbia of the poor, Snowtown takes the myth of the happy-go-lucky sun-drenched Australian paradise and squeezes the life out of it. In director Justin Kurzels eye its a place where absence of ambition, lack of role models, and plain boredom can create just the right recipe for susceptibility to depravity, and nightmares. Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) is a fairly typical 16 year old, quiet, inoffensive, living in the rundown family home with a gaggle of older and younger brothers and his old before her time mother Elizabeth (Louise Harris). Video games provide most of the stimuli, attendance at the local Baptist church provides bemusement. With an older brother whose main expression is noise whilst beating the life out of a drum kit, and a neighbour keeping his mother company, Jamie is aimless. Unfocussed. Primed. One evening, left in the care of the seemingly grounded neighbour Jamie and his two younger brothers are quickly exposed to the mans sham stability as he photographs them in various stages of undress, guiding them from behind the flashing bulb of his camera. Jamies basic need for male authority and direction betrayed by each snap of the shutter, firing at the boys blank expressions like perverted gunshots. Attacked by Jamies mother, and hiding behind shuttered windows, the neighbour becomes the first recipient of Buntings crusade. First seen encased in biker leathers and helmet, he wakes Jamie by gunning his engine outside his perverted targets front door - his mechanical roar of disgust. The next morning, appearing at the kitchen table like a youthful Father Christmas with bike rides, eggs and bacon, and ice cream. A charming, magic man. Jamie is hooked, right down to the bone. But what starts off as relatively harmless, although admittedly twisted torment (particularly if youre a kangaroo), soon becomes a pattern of hatred, an idealism that reduces morality to the black and white of right versus the undeserving. The undeserving morphing from the perverse to the simply damaged, the addicted, the mentally disabled. It is a descent into a kind of matter of fact evil that leaves you bewildered, numb. Not long into Buntings seduction of Jamie he unifies them with a symbolic shaving of heads and it gives Pittaways face an odd quality, unformed and empty, waiting to be moulded into something, anything. Discovered in a local shopping centre, his performance is remarkable. He transforms from emptiness, to adoration, to a crushing realisation that the madness that his mentor is pedalling is inescapable. You despise him for his cowardice and for his complicity, and you pity him for the life that brought him here, that ultimately there is no-one to show him the way out of Buntings psychotic miasma. As the other half of Snowtowns double-act and a first-timer to film, Daniel Henshall is catastrophically magnetic. From his initial appearance you will him to guide Jamie to something beyond his stagnant environment, even as his disease creates ever more toxic horror. Like Jamie, were seduced by his solidity, his charm, the unwavering gaze that seems to take your measure in moments. Watching a victims pet snakes Henshalls eyes are more mysteriously reptilian than the reptiles, and when Jamies younger brother, still in the blind throes of adoration, gets his own ritual haircut its as coldly frightening as Buntings dispassionate study of one of his victims staccato death throes. In bringing the story of Snowtown to the screen Kurzel, and his director of photography Adam Arkapaw, have created a modern masterpiece of non-sensationalist malice, and menace. Over the soundtracks driving, thumping refrain it leaves us at a literal and mental crossroads; its a celluloid nightmare. A brilliant, disturbed, and chilling nightmare that for better, or for worse, stays with you long after its end. Snowtown opens in the UK today!