4/30/2023 0 Comments Limbo film![]() His stint working in the drug squad has left him with the kind of recreational habits that are best performed in private. It is more or less deserted, by both staff and other customers. Travis is staying in one: The Limbo Motel is a crepuscular maze of tunnels carved out of a mountain that still seems to rumble with the memories of past excavations. Known as ’the opal capital of the world’, this remote corner of South Australia is pitted with caves, or ‘dugouts’, which started as mines for precious stones but ended up being used as dwellings. The picture’s location contributes considerably to its brooding, secretive atmosphere – the town of Limbo is fictitious, but the film’s unique location is the opal mining community of Coober Pedy. He discovers that the lives of her surviving family members, her brother Charlie (Rob Collins) and his all-but-estranged sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) are in their own kind of limbo – in part because the crime was never solved, and in part due to their cruel and traumatic treatment at the hands of the investigating police. Travis arrives in Limbo charged with reviewing a 20-year-old case: the disappearance of an Aboriginal girl called Charlotte Hayes. It’s a distinctive work, both visually – the stark black and white photography accentuates the uncanny, almost lunar pockmarks on this scarred terrain – and in terms of its intriguingly detached outback noir storytelling. This film is conceived as a further exploration of the themes that Sen confronted with two of his most recent pictures, Mystery Road and Goldstone, both of which dealt with the Indigenous experience of Australia’s justice system (with the former having inspired several TV series of the same name). Sen returns to Berlin’s main Competition for the first time in more than two decades, since his breakthrough debut picture Beneath Clouds premiered at the festival in 2002. It’s a distinctive work, both visually and in terms of its intriguingly detached outback noir storytelling. ![]() This is a bleakly impressive work from multi-hyphenate Indigenous filmmaker Sen who, in addition to writing and directing the piece, also shot, edited and co-produced it as well as composing the sparsely used score. Despite the film’s rather overused title, Limbo should stand out as a picture of interest to arthouse distributors and festival programmers. ![]() It’s evident everywhere, from the wary lag of the storytellig to Simon Baker’s remarkable, dialled-down central performance, as Travis Hurley, a cop who has clearly been chewed up and spat out many times over by the demands of his job. There’s an extraordinary bone-deep weariness that lies heavily on Ivan Sen’s terrific, atmospheric crime movie, an enervated, almost listless quality that is baked into life in the south Australian desert town of Limbo. Source: Berlin International Film Festivalĭir/scr: Ivan Sen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |