Netflix's Aussie film The Stranger, starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, is a scorching dark drama worth seeing

Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris are two men living amongst the criminal underbelly. Neither are who they seem, and both have much to lose in Thomas Wright's scorching dark drama, The Stranger.

While slow to get into its story and to build pace, this new Aussie drama funded by Netflix builds on both, working into a rough intensity, and while documenting some violent characters, focuses more on their character than on the violence

It opens with a dark aerial shot around Mount Tibrogargan in the Glasshouse Mountains north of Brisbane, and while I'd been trying not to read anything about this film before watching it, any Queenslander would immediately connect that landscape with the case of Daniel Morcombe, the 13-year-old boy who went missing from a bus stop near his home in the Glasshouse Mountains.

And indeed, Thomas Wright's screenplay is based on Kate Kuriacou's The Sting, and follows the large undercover police operation investigating that crime, though it's a good 30 minutes into the film before we get to scenes of police and investigators discussing a crime.

Initially, in a slow build, we get to know Mark (Joel Edgerton), already embedded in some kind of criminal hierarchy.

He has befriended Henry Teague (Sean Harris), a minor league crim with a series of jail stints in his past.

Mark has some nefarious job that he needs an extra pair of hands to help with, and he spends time getting to know the man, he introduces him to a few of the levels of criminal hierarchy that he works with, getting a feel for Henry's reliability, and his potential as an extra pair of hands.

Mark is in fact an undercover cop, and while he lives his daytime job as a rough and violent character, he comes home to the young son he is bringing up as a single parent. It's hard for Mark to separate his lives and he sometimes allows the overwhelming stress he is working under to come out in his home life.

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Henry, meanwhile, is living his own set of lies. He is in fact the target of Mark's undercover sting, not the criminals they're both working for, working to extract a confession about Henry's real identity and his past actions.

Both leading men give mesmerising performances. We're already familiar with Joel Edgerton's bad guy persona from films like Animal Kingdom. While I like my Joel Edgerton characters to be more Star Wars and less thug, he is a wonderful performer and a savvy producer for this production.

While Edgerton looks as exhausted as anyone juggling so much in their lives might, the real transformation of the film belongs to British actor Sean Harris.

Harris has been the bad guy before, though in films like Mission: Impossible - Fallout, it's as a put-together and savvy brainiac.

Here, between his physicality and the film's makeup and costuming team, they design a wrecked human being. It's scary to watch and very well achieved.

Jada Alberts from Wentworth and Mystery Road has a small but impressive turn as one of the case's lead detectives.

As director, and as screenwriter, Thomas Wright doesn't take the path others might. He shies away from the level of violent intensity other Aussie crime flicks radiate, films like The Boys or Snowtown.

And yet, with Oliver Coates's score acting as the undertow, he drags you out to emotional places, he manages to scare you woundingly while withholding the kind of violence porn many directors would have approached this with, being more concerned with the impact of crime.

While this film's big-screen season will soon be over and become available on the streaming platform that funded it, it is worth catching it in the cinema to fully appreciate the atmospheric work of cinematographer Sam Chiplin.

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