6.
The Snowtown Murders (aka
Snowtown) (Netflix Instant)
The first of three horror films without any supernatural elements that I will watch as part of this year's marathon, this was the most horrifying and harrowing film I had seen so far. My feelings of horror and disgust were magnified by the fact that this was a fictional interpretation of a real Australian serial killer and the fact that the way the protagonist was broken and conditioned into following the serial killer and the circumstances that created the killers are not isolated to just poor Australian suburbs. The film's specificity gives it the power to be abstracted and generalized; what happened here wouldn't be farfetched if the film had been set in a poor American town instead.
Since the movie is based on real events, I'm going to talk directly about the events that were shown in the film and drop the spoiler skirting policy of previous posts.
I wonder how many people asked "what if" in the aftermath of these murders. What if the police had responded to Elizabeth Harvey's claim that her boyfriend was sexually abusing her sons? Would Elizabeth have felt compelled to let John Bunting into her life because John was the only one who would take action against the paedophile? What if Elizabeth and her family didn't live in a poor suburb of Adelaide? If her family had been better off financially, would her eldest son be the bastard that he was portrayed to be? What if Jamie and his brothers had a more stable father figure in their lives? Would he still have been so easily conditioned to aid John in his murders? What if the community members had been more skeptical about their neighbors' disappearances? Would John and his gang have been caught earlier? What if the community had understood that homosexuals are not necessarily paedophiles? Would understanding that distinction have prevented John from gaining a foothold in the community to start doing what he did? All I can see from the Wikipedia entry on the actual Snowtown murders is that the leaders of Snowtown wanted to change the town's name because it had been tainted by the scandal.
John groomed Jamie to be his accomplice in murder as much as Elizabeth's boyfriend groomed Jamie and his brothers to be his victims. As if by magic, John appeared. John then used positive reinforcement to befriend Elizabeth, her sons, and the larger community through gestures large (driving away Elizabeth's boyfriend from the town through harassment, though doesn't that just make him some other town's problem) and small (buying ice cream for the boys, letting them ride his motorcycle, taking Elizabeth and the boys to a local arcade for dinner, video games, and dancing). It seemed John had become romantically involved with Elizabeth; did he do it so he could gain access to Jamie and his brothers? By driving away 1 paedophile, John's stature in the community seemed to grow. At what point did John decide that driving them away wasn't good enough, and that he had to kill them?
Because the film is not a procedural, it leaves the viewer haunted with these questions, even as it tells its tale almost bloodlessly. Almost none of the acts of killing are shown; the one we do see is one we had to see because it warps Jamie and desensitizes him so he can assist John. Instead, we only feel the aftermath through the voicemails that John had his victims leave for their family members to dissuade them from looking for them.
Daniel Henshall's performance as John Bunting astonished me. Even when he's asking about everyone else's health, his aggression and mercilessness come through the twinkle in his eye. He doesn't leave room for another person to think when he asks questions; he dominates them by following his questions with "yes?" or "right?" to lead the other person to agreeing with him. Only Elizabeth seems to protest John's behavior, but she's too burnt out by life to effect an effective response.
There's a moment that sticks with me. We only see John sitting in the backyard in the bottom right of the screen. He gets up and gets two bricks from a pile next to the house. At this point, we, the viewers, have a sense that he is a violent man, but we don't know for sure that he's a killer yet. He leaves the frame and returns to his seat without the bricks. The camera switches to one of Jamie's brothers, who is inexplicably wearing a woman's blouse. We see that John has given him the bricks, and he must hold his arms out while holding the bricks. He's a teenager, and he struggles to keep his arms raised. The camera moves again, and we see John smugly sitting in his lawn chair looking at the child struggle. This is never explained. We can assume that John caught the boy wearing his mother's blouse and skirt, but it's possible that John wanted to torture the boy by making him put on the blouse and skirt and forcing him to hold the bricks aloft.
Lucas Pittaway's performance James (Jamie) Vlassakis is also remarkable; it takes skill to appear to give up agency and be so powerless. At first, Jesse Pinkman's description in
Breaking Bad of another character as an "Opie dead-eyed piece of shit" was all I kind of think when I watched Pittaway on screen, but Pittaway's Jamie is as much a victim as any of the people John killed. It doesn't absolve Jamie of his guilt, but it complicates things, which is a necessary complication in such a complicated tale.
Finally, I love this poster. There's another that shows Lucas Pittaway as Jamie standing alone, but the visual idea that John is Jamie's devil, whispering into his ear, is a powerful image.
