Bleak, that’s what the movie Snowtown is. Bleak yet brilliant.
Although the word ‘brilliant’ is traditionally synonymous with rays of sunlight, of which this movie has none, Snowtown will nonetheless implode your guts and leave you darkly transformed long after it has finished. So dark was the experience that several audience members walked out, including some poor bugger who had such a turn an ambulance medic had to be called in.
Snowtown is based on the infamous Snowtown murders, that concerns the brutal killings of 11 people between 1992 and 1999 in South Australia. The crimes were eventually uncovered when the remains of the victims were found in barrels of acid located in a rented former bank building.
There is no drama or moving plot in this slow burn rendering of these terrible killings to catapult an audience towards moral indignation or righteousness.
Snowtown is more like a secret file, than a story, unveiled before you page by dreadful page under the cruel expertise of its director, Justin Kurzel. Kurtzel gives us no action sequences or violence that could compare to an average shoot ’em up video game because he doesn’t wish to desensitise your viewing experience, he wants you to eat its body parts slowly and piece by piece.
The main subject matter of this film is the darkest it can be: paedophilia and homosexuality intermixed, which serves as the focus for Buntings rage against the world.
Throughout, there is a reoccurring relationship between the drab working class business of putting food in your mouth and the cutting up of flesh, to remind us that what we eat does come from slaughterhouses, not the shiny shelves of a supermarket.
There is also the correlation between the scout hall church meetings where the family gather for moral encouragement and Bunting’s regular kitchen meetings where he stirs up resentment amongst the community. On this rare occasion it’s the church meetings that are doing no harm, while it’s Bunting’s priestly righteousness that creates a platform for recruitment to assist him in his plans for vigilante violence.
Some cinema audiences will wonder whether we need to see such brutality yet again, but it’s not the violence that is confronting it’s the social nihilism that may have nurtured this violence in the first place.
Although Snowtown will create a great deal of controversy with the word ‘banned’ being bandied about it is a sure sign the makers of this social commentary about small town fascism have succeeded in doing such a remarkable job.
Snowtown opened nationally on May 19.