Starring: Shane Jacobson, Clayton Jacobson, Kim Gyngell, Lynette Curran, and Sarah Snook
Distributor: Label Distribution
Runtime: 97 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2018
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This Australian drama is set in a country property in Victoria. Two brothers decide to murder their stepfather – they want to kill him, so that they can claim their rightful inheritance.
The murder attempt is planned compulsively in detail, especially by Jeff (Clayton Jacobson) who fakes a holiday to Sydney, so that he and his brother, Terry (Shane Jacobson), can sneak into their family home to kill their elderly stepfather, Rodger (Kim Gyngell). Jeff wants to stage Rodger’s murder as a suicide, and wants it to be seen that way. He firmly believes that “failing to plan is planning to fail”, and he has a schedule of what he has to do before the gruesome event.
Their mother (Lynette Curran) is dying of cancer and does not have long to live, and she has decided to leave everything to Rodger, her new husband. Jeff and Terry think that Rodger has never really cared for them, and Jeff blames him for his father’s suicide. The two brothers’ father hanged himself after their mother walked out on him.
The brothers plan to stage the perfect murder, but things don’t go as planned. Jeff’s obsessive preparation of the murder scene dramatically backfires when tension escalates between the two brothers, as they roam through the house, vacuum cleaning it, in preparation for Rodger’s arrival.
Terry has never been sure about what they are doing, and Jeff doesn’t like Terry all that much. Jeff might be fond of Terry, but he also resents him, because he thinks Terry is stupid. When things go awry, the film descends into a farce that bears similarity to what might happen in a murder tale directed by the Coen Brothers. The movie is akin in tone and style to the movie, “Fargo” (1966).
The one thing that most upsets the brothers’ plans for a successful murder is the fact that the two of them are forced to spend a day together, and they have a family history that pits them against each other. Terry has spent his life as the submissive brother, and goes along with his stepfathers’ murder because he is doing what Jeff tells him to do. And Terry isn’t entirely convinced that Rodger deserves to die.
The film finds comedy at first in witty dialogue between the brothers, and then looks for it in brutal acts. The comic force of the movie is a long way from the gentle, Aussie humour of what Shane Jacobson delivered in the popular movie, “Kenny” (2006). In preparing for the murder, the brothers remember the physical abuse that occurred in their family; they get on each other’s nerves; and they start to bicker about their lot in life – one brother is divorced, and the other is separated from his wife and family. It is not long before we realise that we are faced with a very dysfunctional family, and sadism lies close to the surface of it, when frustration boils over, which it does.
The film is constructed skilfully. Acting in the movie is good, especially by the Jacobson brothers, who are on the screen almost the entire time. Kim Gyngell and Lynette Curran play characters, who meet untimely ends, and Sarah Snook complicates things by arriving at the wrong time to collect a horse – to find more than she expected. The film’s cinematography is dark and brooding, and uses lots of revealing close-ups, and its musical score is evocatively moody.
This movie offers a distinctive vision of family life that is very macabre. The twists in the plot strain credibility, deliberately so, and Clayton Jacobson tries a little erratically to control the direction of the film, as it shifts from being a taut thriller to something far darker.
The movie’s main thrust is to explore the tenuous balance between family dysfunction, misguided loyalty, and gruesome happenings. It is a grim film that nevertheless aims cleverly to capture the sharpness of black comedy, but it is definitely not one to watch before any family celebration.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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