Monkey Puzzle

Synopsis: Five friends head into the Blue Mountains on a four day hiking trip in search of one of the world’s rarest trees, the Wollemi Pine, often referred to as a ‘Monkey Puzzle’ tree.

Monkey Puzzle is a rather undercooked film. The ingredients are good but they haven’t gelled into a satisfying whole and despite its great potential it never convinces dramatically. Perhaps this is because it is the first feature film for Mark Forstmann and as an ambitious project, it needed a more experienced director to bring it off successfully.

Written by Forstmann with television writer Stephen Davis, the script is a predictable affair that lurches through its narrative arc dragging its under-qualified cast with it. The opening set-up, overly indebted to American teen movies with their obligatory sexualized banter, establishes the four friends Carl (Ben Geurens), Dylan (Ryan Johnson), Pippa (Ella Scott Lynch) and Toni (Billie Rose Pritchard) as a happy-go-lucky lot out for a good time. This we know is going to change. For some unknown reason they invite along the older, chronically dyspeptic Zac (Socratis Otto) who equally oddly accepts with only a blanket and a thin foam mattress by way of equipment. Clearly he will bring them problems. Then despite Carl having impressive rope skills they head off into the bush without a map. Sure enough, soon they’re lost. Then they let wild animals eat all their food. Now they’re lost and hungry and eventually wet and the happy-go-lucky mood has long gone, something which, however, quite perks up Zac, who is well-pleased that his companions have made such a mess of things. Of course, as we suspected he’s only going to make it worse.

The film is a study in group and individual psychology under stress. Well that’s what it aspires to be at least, but Forstmann is unable to show the breakdown in an organic way, behavioural changes coming as the young people turn on each other but too much on cue and not all plausibly. Carl, the prime mover in their predicament volunteers to his erstwhile girlfriend Pippa that he’s “fucked up” (psychologically, not in the sense that he has made an error of judgement) whilst tomboyish Toni worries that her anxiety is too girlie. Carl disappears only to return briefly in an odd scene at the film’s end, whilst Toni knuckles down with no further consequences.

Forstmann also fails to use the bush setting to enhance the estrangement of the characters and even more basically to even suggest the rigours of being lost. The Blue Mountains remain picture post card pretty and despite having nothing to eat for some days, walking waist deep in freezing cold water and carrying Zac on a stretcher, our protagonists don’t seem particularly peckish or much worse for wear. In fact, when they finally and inexplicably stumble on their starting point, Carl shimmies up the rope and pulls his fellow campers up after him. To where, I’m not too sure but indeed the entire closing stage of the film was somewhat opaque to me.

Monkey Puzzle is far from being a bad film, it just doesn’t ring true, at least on the big screen. Forstmann might have looked at Deliverance, the John Boorman 1972 classic about a fishing trip gone horribly wrong to learn something about characterisation and staging. As it is, he seems to have rushed into this. Which is a pity as a lack of know-how and no doubt, resources, have squandered a good idea.

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