Tuesday 25 October 2011

Review - Snowtown (2011 - Dir. Justin Curzel)



This was the secret film of the festival this year and it is one of the grittiest films I've ever seen. Have a look at the Gritty Checklist to see just how gritty it is. It is so gritty that if you fell off your BMX on to it you'd get a really nasty barked shin. After about half an hour I was thinking that Doccortex would love this. He loves his grit. 


I'm not so sure that he likes really dull, tedious films though. Snowtown doesn't get off to a brilliant start, but it's okay. It seems to be drip feeding you little tidbits about the real life serial killers that the film is based on. You gradually get to know more about what the little tinkers are up to. We then reach a torture scene and you think, 'This is where it's all going to kick off.' The scene isn't harrowing enough. Toenail scrunching. Big deal. Strangulation. Never really that bad (except perhaps the scene in Antichrist, that's a tad harsh). I was hoping for a bit of extremely hard-to-watch gore. 




Never mind. There's surely another scene of intense gruellingness. Sorry. That's your lot. What you do get is endless hours of gritty bleary bleakness. At one point I couldn't remember where they were going or why. They were just driving around in their car a bit. I spent the endless latter stages of the film trying to work out when they could finish it and how much longer it would be.




The acting is all good stuff. Daniel Henshall who plays the main nutter, John Bunting is suitably believable and the child actors all look like they come from the Australian version of Rotherham. Overall though, it's up against Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and it doesn't fare well. Henry is far more disturbing and bleak. Watch that instead unless you are a total grit addict.
2/10
evlkeith




If you like this you could also try:
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Gomorrah, Amores Perros, The Horseman.




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