Corrupted Masculinities: Review of Snowtown

Snowtown is one of the most astonishingly good Australian feature films in recent years – and perhaps the most disturbing.

Dividing audiences both here and overseas, it has been variously described as ‘degrading’, ‘depraved’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘a masterpiece’.  

The film is based on a shocking series of murders that were perpetrated in Adelaide’s disadvantaged northern suburbs in the 1990s, murders so gruesome that they would stretch the imagination of a crime fiction writer. The discovery of the remains of some of the victims, stored in barrels in a disused bank in rural Snowtown – not the location of most of the murders – horrified Australia.

The film is, simply, a tour de force – a triumph of tone and the avoidance of the many traps that filming its weighted story would set in the path of any filmmaker. It’s no wonder that at its Cannes debut in May, this low-budget film earned a special mention from the President of the Critics’ Week Jury.

Chilling and at times confrontingly graphic, the film takes some dramatic licence but is broadly factual. It was filmed on location in rundown public housing areas in northern Adelaide, and uses mostly non-actors from the local community to relate the events that led up to the discovery of the bodies.

This gives Snowtown a grit, realism and emotional truth that leave filmmakers like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh far behind. It’s a better film than Animal Kingdom, which falls apart dramatically after the first half hour; it’s similar in tone to The Boys, and at least on a par with it. The film is riveting but there’s no sense in which it is easy to watch.

Perhaps the most outstanding achievement of first-time film director Justin Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant is that Snowtown depicts how the seeds of evil flourish and take root in poverty and marginalisation without demonising poor people themselves. There is an unflinching willingness to not only confront the extremities of human evil, but to account for them. There are moments of extreme violence in the film, but they are never exploitative or sensationalist.

Charismatic sociopath John Bunting arrives in town in classic outsider style. He worms his way into the lives of a marginalised family, vulnerable single mother Liz Harvey and her four sons. Charming the family with home-cooked meals and ocker cheerfulness, he holds kitchen table lectures for locals where he fosters and exploits their anger at local paedophiles, and styles himself as a righteous vigilante.

Central to the film is the twisted father–son relationship Bunting fosters with the vulnerable 16-year-old Jamie Vlassakis, who is desperate for a father figure. The audience traces Jamie’s devastating journey as Bunting’s true nature is slowly revealed, and as Jamie becomes first an unwilling accessory to the violence and then a perpetrator.

The violence in the film, both on and off screen, does escalate, from dismembering a kangaroo to the bloodthirsty torture and murder of marginalised, unloved people. But the graphic violence is not unrelenting as some critics have falsely stated: it’s occasional and always intrinsic to the plot.

What is unrelenting is the atmosphere of moral corruption and hopelessness that pervades the film. Yet this is always intermingled with an almost poignant examination of the intensity of life in all its guises. The film never falls into the trap of nihilism, and it never discounts or belittles the attachments the characters have to their environments and to each other, refusing to draw an aesthetic line between the killings and everyday life.

The blighted suburban setting features small fibro houses surrounded by junk, and shabby interiors that are overcrowded and messy, with the television perpetually on in the background. Yet some of the more mundane moments of the film, especially in the early scenes, have a force and intensity that lends a quasi-beauty to the ugly surrounds. An early scene of the younger children doing wheelies on their bikes on the road outside the house in front of a blindingly strong sun is both slightly menacing and visually appealing.

This is what the film intends: to throw us in at the deep end, visually and emotionally, from the beginning. Given the setting and the use of mainly non-actors, you might think it would have a documentary feel. Not at all. We are not to be allowed the degree of distance that a documentary, with its calm voiceover and recital of facts, might offer. Instead we are forced to witness and vicariously experience the human story behind the killings, and to identify with Jamie’s dawning horror. And in doing so, we are somehow implicated in that story.

Kurzel uses frequent close-ups, especially in group scenes, to bring the audience in on the action and make us feel we are part of it. The viewer’s forced identification with Jamie as he bonds with Bunting and transitions from observer to participant is deeply unsettling. We are being interpolated. We are being confronted with the question: Why did you let this happen?

While the director has stated his wish to underline the banality of the settings in which the killings took place, his emphasis on the domestic achieves more than this. Food is a metaphor for the corrupted love Bunting offers Jamie, and for the nurturing the young man longs for. Bunting’s endless serving up of hearty cooked breakfasts and dinners is indissoluble from his brutalised attitude to the human remains he produces through his ghastly torture scenarios. We are not permitted to separate the masculine and domestic connection that the killer offers Jamie from the ultimate horror of his actions, any more than 16-year-old Jamie can.

The film’s pace doesn’t change that much: it’s charged from the very beginning. But the intense focus of the camera is never voyeuristic or fixated on aesthetics at the expense of emotional complexity. The soundtrack charts the tense atmosphere in a way that is visceral, bringing us closer to Jamie’s perspective and often imitating a heartbeat.

The use of non-actors is inspired. There isn’t a trace of amateurishness here, just an authenticity that makes the film more compelling. How much less powerful it would have been if recognisable stars had played the main roles.

Daniel Henshall, the only professional actor in the film, gives a flawless performance as Bunting in what was his first feature film role. Looking like the baby-faced Damon Gameau, he is compelling as a sociopathic sadist who charms with his down-to-earth cheeriness.

Newcomer Lucas Pittaway, discovered by the filmmakers buying jellybeans in a suburban shopping centre, may look like a cut-price Heath Ledger but his acting style in the role of Jamie is very much an interior, understated process; he nails this introverted child–man who becomes brainwashed by Bunting and whose life and innocence are destroyed by his need for a male role model. Louise Harris gives an intense and riveting performance as Liz; this character’s air of benighted defeat, and her passivity following her discovery of Bunting’s actions, are clearly the results of a difficult history of bare survival.

Some critics have complained about a poor set-up, and difficulties in working out who’s who. There were indeed a few times when it was difficult to work out what was going on, an unfortunate byproduct of the super-effective realism.

Apparently some of the real-life murder victims were so marginalised that two or three years after their disappearance no one had noticed. At one point in the film, Bunting says of his victims: ‘They’re nobody ... They’re nothing’. Snowtown forces us to ask whether on some level we think the same thing; and whether we must bear some responsibility for allowing the kind of poverty and disadvantage in which such evil could flourish.