When your mistress asks you to steal the money her husband stole in a bloody armed robbery and then burn down their house to cover up the theft, you know you're in trouble. This neo-noir from Australia uses this scenario and piles on the complications. Raymond Yale doesn't know which bad decision is the one that's going to get him in the end.
Raymond (David Roberts, THE MATRIX RELOADED) has promised to leave his wife Martha (Lucy Bell, OSCAR AND LUCINDA) and run away with the young hairdresser Carla (Claire van der Boom). Raymond keeps saying he wants to save enough to make a decent life for them elsewhere. He's overseeing the construction of a new resort built around a central square. In contracting the cement supplier, he takes a kickback. But when Carla spots her husband Smithy (Anthony Hayes, RABBIT-PROOF FENCE) hiding a bag full of cash in the attic, she devises a much quicker way to get they money they need to escape.
So Raymond hires an arsonist named Billy (Joel Edgerton, ATTACK OF THE CLONES) to make the burning seem like an electrical fire. But no crime is perfect and things go horribly wrong. One mishap leads to another and another and before too long theft turns to murder and each of the players doesn't know whom to trust. Smithy particularly begins to mistrust his cohorts in the robbery. Leonard (Brendan Donoghue) looks at Claire the wrong way and Eddie (Damon Herriman, HOUSE OF WAX) is just a shifty fella.
Edgerton co-wrote the film with Matthew Dabner and his brother Nash directed. They seem to be inspired by films like the Coen Bros.’ BLOOD SIMPLE or Sam Raimi’s A SIMPLE PLAN. The characters here aren’t as rich as those films, but the irony is. The filmmakers show a good sense of dark humor with a metaphor in the middle involving Raymond and Claire’s dogs that sums up the entire film nicely.
They skillfully plot this thriller, where as many as three threads are weaving in and out of each other at any moment. Each character has their own motivations and they come in conflict with the others' desires. Sometimes misunderstandings and misreadings create even more problems. At one point Raymond begins receiving blackmail threats and there are so many possibilities that it could be anybody.
Raymond begins to slip under the pressure, which only makes things worse. Once he enters into crime, he is forced to commit new crimes to cover up the previous crimes. As the genre demands we know this will not end well. He's gone swimming in the deep end and there are hidden sharks everywhere. But when it's all said and done we feel pity for him. In a recent study, men admitted they’d give up their cars and other expensive items to be with their mistresses. They, like Raymond, just can’t help themselves. Once you dive in, you got to keep kicking don’t you?
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Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
