Snowtown

Review by Anthony Morris

If all you know about the Snowtown killings – aka the "body in the barrel murders" – is that, well, they involved bodies in barrels in Snowtown, then you might want to do a little research before checking this extremely grim film out.

Not that it doesn’t do a solid job of laying the facts out there : when John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) drifts into Adelaide's run down northern suburbs, he seems like a rare decent bloke in a sea of no-hopers.

It's hardly surprising then that Elizabeth (Louise Harris) takes him into her home, where he quickly befriends her eldest boy Jamie (Lucas Pittaway).

After her family’s involvement with a paedophile living across the road, John’s firm commitment to cleaning up the neighbourhood falls on welcome ears with the locals, and when people start disappearing, well, at least they left a message behind saying where they were going, right?

Director Justin Kurzel does a brilliant job of creating a nightmarish, claustrophobic atmosphere here, enveloping both the on-screen characters and the audience in a seemingly inescapable world of horror.

This isn’t a slasher film (it doesn’t even go into the details of the killing all that closely, hence the research suggestion) and the gore, while extremely hard to look at, isn’t excessive.

The problem here is that while there’s no light in the story at all – and justifiably so, considering its grim real world origins – there’s no real examination of the events past the surface horror.

John simply arrives in town, bad to the bone and not afraid to manipulate people for his own ends.

There doesn’t need to be a lighter side to the story (really, how could there?), but there does need to be some reason beyond simply re-creating the horror for a film like this to be anything more than an extremely effective trip down a tunnel of horrors with no light whatsoever at the end.

4 out of 5

Snowtown
Australian release: 19th May, 2011
Official Site: Snowtown
Cast: Daniel Henshall, Lucas Pittaway
Director: Justin Kurzel