Film Review: ‘The Snowtown Murders’ Marks Auspicious Debut For Director, Lead Actors

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

CHICAGO – With a mixture of brooding unease and morbid fascination, the camera in Justin Kurzel’s fact-based thriller has a tendency to follow characters from behind as they enter a new realm of darkness. It’s the darkness residing outside the dingy walls of a hazardous home in South Australia that draws a damaged young man like a moth to a flame. He’s seeking a father figure, but what he finds is something unspeakable.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

The young man, Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), is an enigma from the get-go. At age 16, he’s old enough to know that the nude photographs taken of him by his mother’s boyfriend are more than a little inappropriate. Yet he waits for his dangerously clueless mother, Elizabeth (Louise Harris), to discover the news, which prompts her to cross the street (in the first of many memorable tracking shots) and beat the pedophile senseless, just like Ray Liotta in “GoodFellas.” This will be Elizabeth’s first and last act of good sense in the picture.

Read Matt Fagerholm’s full review of “The Snowtown Murders” in our reviews section.

Why didn’t Jamie speak up earlier about the abuse? Perhaps he was too scared and bewildered, or perhaps he was simply resigned to being submissive. In one shocking scene, his burly older half-brother, Troy (Anthony Groves), takes advantage of Jamie’s weaker physicality and rapes him on the floor of their house. It seems as if Jamie’s entire life has been designed to make him susceptible to the advances of predator, and the latest threat comes in the form of Elizabeth’s new boyfriend, John (Daniel Henshall). He seems like a nice enough guy at first, and has a generally cordial nature that allows him to effortlessly ingratiate himself into the family unit. The twinkle in his eye initially appears comforting, but there’s something off about him. He’s all too happy to encourage Jamie and his younger siblings to deface the pedophile’s property in exceedingly unsettling ways. There’s a hardness to his smile in scenes where he leads boisterous conversation among community members, who casually reveal the gruesome methods they would utilize when obtaining justice. It’s the anger of victimized souls and the desperation of their circumstances that leads John to feed off them like a parasite. He sees Jamie as an ideal apprentice for his passion projects and decides to take the form of a protective guardian. And so begins one of the most sordid and unforgettable coming-of-age pictures in recent memory.

Continue reading for Matt Fagerholm’s full “The Snowtown Murders” review.

Lucas Pittaway and Daniel Henshall star in Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders, an IFC Midnight release.
Photo credit: Warp Films Australia Pty Ltd.