Film Review: Mystery Road (2013)
Australia owes much of the vitality of its cinema to its specific geographical and climatic conditions, which have made its exotic landscapes ideal backdrops for Westerns and post-apocalyptic films. Part of this exotic appeal was also embodied by its Indigenous people, the Aboriginal Australians, whose fate following the arrival of white settlers was in many ways similar—and could even be said to be far worse—than that of American Indians. Unlike Hollywood, which has featured Native Americans in its Westerns from the very beginning, Australian cinema has largely ignored them. Even rarer were films that seriously sought to address the economic and other challenges faced by Aboriginal people, marginalised within Australian society and forced to live in ghettos ruled by poverty, alcohol, drugs, and crime. One of the few productions attempting to address this is Mystery Road, a crime film that portrays Aboriginal people from an exceptionally authentic perspective, given that its writer, director, and creator, Ivan Sen, is himself of partial Aboriginal heritage.
The lead actor, Aaron Pedersen, who is also of Aboriginal descent, portrays the character Jay Swan, a police detective returning to his hometown in rural Australia after a long absence. The plot begins with the discovery of an Aboriginal teenager’s body, and Swan, who knew the victim personally, takes charge of the investigation. It quickly becomes apparent that his task will be far from easy, partly because he himself faces racist prejudices from the white population, while his own community greets him with distrust, viewing him as a traitor. A far more serious issue is that his superiors and colleagues display a clear lack of enthusiasm for the investigation, preferring instead to cover it up—especially as the evidence begins to point towards connections with the case of a murdered police officer, as well as a drug trade in which officer Johnno (Hugo Weaving) may even be implicated. What weighs most heavily on Swan, however, is that the murdered girl was a close friend of his own daughter Crystal, with whom, along with his ex-wife and her mother Mary (Tasma Walton), he has long been estranged.
Sen has crafted his film in a style that, at first glance, seems more suited to an art-house drama than a conventional thriller. The narrative unfolds at an exceptionally slow pace, but Sen attempts to compensate by employing striking landscapes of the Australian Outback, which, largely thanks to Sen’s own cinematography, create a palpable atmosphere and serve as a kind of alternative character within the film. Sen skilfully plays with Western iconography, including the protagonist, who wears a white cowboy hat and carries a revolver at his belt for almost the entire film. Pedersen delivers an exceptional performance, making the character convincing both in scenes where, like a classic Western protagonist, he confronts local racist thugs, and in those depicting his vulnerability, such as during encounters with his estranged family. Pedersen’s performance is significantly supported by his fellow cast members, particularly Weaving in the role of his colleague, about whom it remains unclear until the very end whether Jay intends to eliminate him or, out of genuine friendship, advise him not to interfere with the local drug dealers. The film’s strongest section comes at the very end, where Sen and his team reward the audience’s patience with an exceptionally realistic yet thrilling final confrontation worthy of Western genre classics. Although Sen prioritises atmosphere and character over plot in his film, allowing certain details to remain unexplained or overly ambiguous for a single viewing, Mystery Road remains an exceptionally high-quality genre production, notably superior to the stylistically and thematically similar American film Wind River. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Australian film, unlike Wind River, has been followed by a sequel in the form of the film Goldstone and a television mini-series of the same name.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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