Strangerland

Director: Kim Farrant
Screenplay: Michael Kinirons and Fiona Seres
Stars: Nicole Kidman (Catherine Parker), Hugo Weaving (Detective David Rae), Joseph Fiennes (Matthew Parker), Maddison Brown (Lily Parker), Sean Keenan (Steve Robertson), Nicholas Hamilton (Tommy Parker), Martin Dingle Wall (Neil McPherson), Megan Alston (Sally McPherson), Meyne Wyatt (Burtie), Lisa Flanagan (Coreen), Ben Wood (Bar Fly), Benedict Hardie (Nick), Taylor Ferguson (Cayli), Chris Pattinson (Deputy Cop), Morgan Junor-Larwood (Slug)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2015
Country: Australia / Ireland
Strangerland
StrangerlandThe Australian psychological drama Strangerland is set in the tiny town of Nathgari, which we see in numerous aerial shots surrounded by the expansive, unforgiving wilderness of the Outback, which might as well be labeled “Metaphor for the Human Psyche.” The story hinges on the disappearance of a brother and sister who wander away from their home in the middle of the night and are presumably consumed in a dust storm that hits the next morning, but their disappearance is a kind of Macguffin in that the film is not really about finding them, but rather about how their having disappeared rips the barely-there scabs off their family’s still festering psychological wounds.

Their parents, Catherine (Nicole Kidman) and Matthew (Joseph Fiennes), appear at first glance to be rather typical. She is a stay-at-home mother, he runs the town’s pharmacy. But from the start there are intimations that they preside over a deeply strained household. Their preteen son, Tommy (Nicholas Hamilton), makes no bones about his dislike of their new hometown, and their teenage daughter, Lily (Maddison Brown), is presented as a hypersexualized flirt who appears to take pleasure in making her father uncomfortable. There are intimations that their having moved to Nathgari was in response to a scandal in their previous hometown, and the tensions among all the family members are not just palpable, but definitive. Matthew rebukes Catherine’s attempts at physical intimacy, Tommy leaves the house most nights to wander the neighborhood, and Lily’s willingness to go with the local punks at the skate park is almost frightening in its transparent desperation. Everyone is damaged, everyone is trying to escape, everyone is pulling away from everyone else—and that’s before the kids disappear.

After the dust storm Catherine convinces Matthew to go to the police, something he is reluctant to do for reasons that are, at that point, not entirely clear. The investigating officer, David Rae (Hugo Weaving), immediately senses the preexisting distress in the family, and his investigation soon uncovers a whole closet of rattling skeletons, the door for which has barely clicked shut. Rae has his own problematic connection with the case, in that he is involved with Coreen (Lisa Flanagan), whose son Burtie (Meyne Wyatt), has been painting the Parkers’ house and may have been somehow involved in the disappearance. As the investigation wears on and little turns up, the tensions mount, revealing more and more of Catherine’s desperation to connect with someone, anyone; Matthew’s insistence on saving face despite a frightening anger management problem; and the depths of their children’s despair and sad attempts to reach out, which is best embodied in a diary/scrapbook that Catherine finds in Lily’s room.

And always around them is the wilderness—the literal place where Lily and Matthew most likely are, dead or alive, and the metaphorical reminder of the emptiness that everyone is trying to fill. First-time feature director Kim Farrant, working with cinematographer P.J. Dillon (Vikings), gives Strangerland a beautiful, disquieting aura that is at times powerful, but at other times self-consciously stylized (the constantly dim interiors feel a bit overbearing in their symbolism). She draws strong performances from all of her leads, with Kidman exuding the kind of confused anguish that only grows more meaningful as we learn about her family’s past, Fiennes conveying a chilly exterior that cannot contain a boiling cauldron inside, and Weaving providing a sense of stability that virtually everyone around him lacks. The drama in Strangerland is intense, revolving as it does around failed parenting, licentious sexuality as an expression of emotional vacuity, and the horrors of not knowing what has happened to one’s children. The mixture of the literal and the symbolic becomes muddy at times, and the screenplay by Michael Kinirons and Fiona Seres sometimes feels like it is adhering too close to an art-film template with its moody shifts in perspective and carefully doled out ambiguity. It ultimately works more than it doesn’t, especially when Keefus Ciancia’s evocative score is burrowing its way under your skin, but by the end it feels a bit too familiar in its open-ended despair.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (2.5)




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