Downriver

Synopsis: James (Reef Ireland) is on parole from juvenile prison where he has served time for his supposed involvement as an eleven-year-old in killing another child. He is driven as a form of penance to find the body which was never found and returns to the caravan park where he was staying when the crime occurred. There he develops a new friendship with Damien (Charles Grounds) and encounters some unpleasant folk from his past, including Anthony (Tom Green) and his family, who may have more to do with past crimes than initially imagined.

Grant Scicluna’s debut feature is suffused with mystery and darkness. The plot begins with the still grieving mother of the murdered boy begging James to tell her where the body was hidden but James claims to have had an epileptic seizure at the time the murder was committed and has no recollection of the facts. This obscurity sets the tone for much of the film which at times compounds the lack of clarity with its opaque dialogue (at least until the abrupt denouement in which all is revealed).  

The timeline flits about from brief scenes of the past, when James and Anthony were young and the murder took place, to the present as James attempts to piece together the jigsaw of his past. We meet James’ depressed mother Paige (Kerry Fox), who has a new boyfriend, Wayne (Robert Taylor), to whom she lies, saying she is childless and claiming that James is her nephew. Then there is Mary, the “dog lady”, played by a remarkably aged Helen Morse, whose significance for the plot never really becomes clear.

One aspect of the film that struck me was the stark contrast between, on the one hand, the unrelenting undercurrent of implicit nastiness and explicit violence, including a rape and a brutal bashing and, on the other hand, the beautiful cinematography. Shot around the upper area of the Yarra River by cinematographer László Baranyai, there are some scenes that take one’s breath away, lending a languid and brooding quality to the sense of place although ironically this is not a place anyone would really want to be. Somewhat oddly it also seems that an unusually high number of the young men in this small town are homosexual – including James, Anthony and Damien, the latter who manages to create a tense triangle of jealousy.

Whilst admiring aspects of this film, especially the excellent performances by the three leading young men, I didn’t care a lot about the characters or the murky revelations that were unearthed and ended up feeling that Scicluna’s film was a case of style over substance. The plot, with its theme of redemption, is something we are well familiar with and as the tension ramps up towards the end, the entire mood seems to shift from its engagingly atmospheric beginnings to a conventional crime story. As for the closing scene, that was a complete mystery to me.

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