Limbo. MA15+, 108 minutes. Four stars.
Indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen gifts us with a slow-burn cold-case mystery shot in crisp black and white that shows off the stark patterns of the Australian outback.
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It highlight the ongoing impact of Australia's justice system on our Indigenous peoples.
Simon Baker is almost unrecognisable as a washed-out detective struggling with addiction while paying off a favour investigating a decades-old missing persons case.
Travis Hurley (Baker) arrives in the outback mining town called Limbo, Coober Pedy as we know it in real life, where much of the population live underground to escape the desert heat.
He checks into the underground Limbo Motel and it does really feel like he is in the ether between worlds, with not a soul around and just the motel's neon sign to place yourself in the world.
Hurley begins a slow dance around the town's population as he attempts to open a cold case investigation into the disappearance and possible murder of a local girl two decades earlier.
Many won't talk to him, particularly the town's Aboriginal men who don't have a good history with the local cops.
Nobody in town has positive memories of the way the original police investigation was run.
Hurley finds an initially hostile lead in Charlie (Rob Collins from Cleverman).
Charlie is the brother of the deceased woman.
His life was turned upside down by the loss and by the subsequent police suspicion directed his way.
Charlie's sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen), however, is more sympathetic to Hurley's attempts to forensically reopen their family wounds.
Extending what might have been a perfunctory look at the case are the car troubles that ground Hurley in the town and give him a loaner Dodge, lending him the air of the sheriff in a classic noir western.
Sen is no stranger to the western genre, having given us Mystery Road and Goldstone.
He uses the genre to explore modern-day Indigenous-white relations and the legacy of two centuries of institutional policies being weaponised against the Indigenous population.
Simon Baker is channelling Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston.
He's still handsome with an aged craggy face, an exhausted angle to the way he carries his frame, and weary to the bone.
What a bravura performance by Nicholas Hope, Bad Boy Bubby himself.
Hope is thoroughly unrecognisable as Joseph, an aged whitefella who might have been on the police's list of suspects back in the day, if they hadn't been so determined to find any Indigenous man to pin their charges on.
Sen is a spectacular filmmaker.
He's a Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard nominee and Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear winner, so you know he knows what he's doing.
With his screenplay, Sen uses an economy of words - whole scenes go by between sentences.
He similarly paces his story languidly, content to let landscape do at least some of the talking.
Sen places his characters as small figures within these enormous outback locales, against great expanses of desert and under endless monochrome skies, and yet this world still feels claustrophobic.
In one scene he shows us a painting done in the Indigenous central desert style.
Perhaps it is a clue, but it also points to the patterns we see throughout the film, the holes and circles and dirt piles that are the detritus of man's pillaging of the environment in the hunt for opals.
Sen is also responsible for the film's cinematography, a desaturated glory that feels at times like Ralph Smart's old Chips Rafferty film Bitter Springs, one of our earliest westerns.
A shout-out to Canberra filmmaker Shannon Wilson-McClinton whose work as co-producer on this beautiful production is noteworthy.
