The Horseman

Christian (Peter Marshall), a divorced father, grieves over the death of his daughter from a heroin overdose. When a porn video arrives anonymously in the mail featuring his daughter clearly drugged, he sets out to find the people involved and mete out retribution. Along the way he meets Alice (Caroline Marohasy), a young runaway and a friendship begins to develop.

Revenge thrillers are a pretty stock standard genre: something terrible happens to someone, usually a member or members of the protagonist’s family who then sets out to get the bad guys. He hurts a lot of people along the way and gets beaten up a bit himself, finally finding the person or people responsible for the original outrage and killing them or something like that. This new Aussie entry into the field is more than respectable in its rendering of this template. In fact, it’s bloody awesome.

The story is basic but effective, a father hunting down and killing all the men involved in the shooting of a porn film his daughter did just before she died from an overdose of drugs that she was given at the shoot. He belts his way through over a half dozen people, torturing and fighting and killing. The fights are well staged, feeling realistic rather than choreographed, and you’ll feel every punch and kick of it. But what sets The Horseman apart from the typical cheap-and-nasty exploitation fodder the genre is known for is the performance of Peter Marshall as the traumatized father. His unhinged grief is so immediate and painful that you forget the fact the film was shot on video and looks kinda cheap. His arresting, raw and gutsy performance is something you can’t take your eyes off. You actually see this guy as a person rather than the usual “instrument of vengeance” that the genre delivers (often disappointingly). Suddenly the violence is no longer there just for cheap thrills for the audience, but has meaning as Christian’s catharsis. And so convincingly does Marshall sell it, and his victims their fear, that The Horseman rises above its budgetary limitations to become a film worth the ride into the dark side of grief.  

FYI: To help raise finance for the production, a short film was shot of the opening scene. The film went on to win Best Independent Drama (10-30mins) at the Queensland New Filmmaker Awards (2006). The feature length version was shown at the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival and a year later has finally managed a limited theatrical release.

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