Starring: Aden Young, Toby Wallace, Pip Miller and Hanna Mangan-Lawrence
Distributor: Independent
Runtime: 96 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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The year is 1902, and Nat – with the high-flown sentiments of Federation still fresh in his mind and his reliance on the belief that “God will provide” – clings to the hope that all will be well. And when three strangers ride up one night, he welcomes them. As he tells his 12-year-old son Tom (Toby Wallace), “your mother always said never turn away strangers; they may be angels in disguise.”
The strangers, veterans of the Boer War, are Henry (Pip Miller), Carver (Neil Pigot) and Jimmy (Eamon Farren), who turn out to be considerably less than angelic. Jimmy, the youngest of the trio who found gold at nearby diggings, excites the interest of Nat’s teenage daughter Sarah (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), who in a mild show of rebellion wonders if this could be her chance to escape her stifling existence under her strict father and make a life for herself. Young Tom is loyal to his father but none the less fascinated by the ex-soldiers and their tales of adventure.
But it’s the gold that brings them all undone, with human greed triggering a slew of slayings that leaves precious few of the principal characters still upright at the end credits.
Screenwriter Andy Cox has tried to conjure something meaningful out of the influence of the land on pioneer families and their inability to tame it, but the failure of director Kriv Stenders (The Illustrated Family Doctor, Blacktown, Boxing Day) to impose a consistent style on the film brings it undone. Roaming from lyrical moments to scenes of brutal violence, it fluctuates between a serious drama and a cheap horror thriller, and is not very successful at either. Some hand-held camerawork is at times irritatingly jerky and much of the acting is overblown, even hammy, resulting in a strained and artificial sort of fevered Gothic melodrama redolent of a long-ago era.
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