Snowtown

Logline: Based on true events, 16 year-old Jamie falls in with his mother's new boyfriend and his crowd of self-appointed neighborhood watchmen, a relationship that leads to a spree of torture and murder.

Cast: Lucas Pittaway, Daniel Henshall, John Bunting, Louise Harris

Directed by: Justin Kurzel

So, I'm going to try something new with today's review. I'm going to skip the summary to make it a quicker read. Summaries also made the logline postings pointless; the logline should tell you mostly what you need to know.

I picked Snowtown because it's pretty new and it's another one of those movies that's generated buzz coming from Australia. It's based on true events of real murderers and is not for the faint hearted. Believe me.

Review

So, like yesterday's movie review, Wish You Were Here, this movie is one of those artsy film festival movies. It relies on capturing the emotions of characters by focusing on their face for large periods of time, it captures the setting with beautiful camera work, and basically screams "hey, I can direct! HIRE ME!" - you know?

Except, Snowtown is a bit different from Wish You Were Here. Not only does it capture emotions with focused camera work - the film pertains some gruesome scenes. For example, there is a scene where the main character gets raped on screen - man on man. There is also a scene where a dog is killed. Honestly, it's one of the most upfront and controversial movies I've seen in awhile.

The film takes a deep approach into the mind of a victimized teenager as his mentor wants to seek vengeance on "homosexuals", "addicts" and "predators". He doesn't just want to beat them up - he wants to torture them and make them pay before he kills them. He's really manipulative and it's a pretty hard story to watch because the whole while I was mesmerized by the completely gruesome images I'd been watching. It was rather captivating.

Topic of the Day

It is very rare that I watch a movie that contains scenes with blood and gore that really stick in my head. Snowtown nails this aspect through the technique of what I guess you can call "The Slow Burn Effect". Things are happening rather slow in the plot, the characters are all whacked in the head in some kind of a way (teenager raped, mentor a psychopath killer, the mother distressed). The setting is gloomy as all hell. All of these are great ingredients to set up these types of memorable scenes. But what did it for me was how slow these scenes were. They weren't quick seconds that went by before skipping to the next scene. The process of the murders dragged out. The moral questioning before killing the dog dragged out and made me cringe more than I wanted to. "The Slow Burn Effect" was used really well in this movie and although I didn't like how slowly paced the plot was, I will forever remember this movie for its slow burn mesmerizing scenes.

Consensus

Snowtown is a nice little gem that not many people know about. Ahem, actually I take that back. It's not nice. Not nice at all. It's actually brutally offensive and controversial. It captures the themes of victimization and manipulation perfectly and the two main actors nail their roles. If only this movie was a bit quicker to get to each plot point it would have scored really high. Keep an eye on Australian film, it's making its surge now. This movie is well done, but not worth the watch if you can't take the heat. 

7/10