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Pop culture detritus.

Snowtown (2011)

A fairly remarkable, chilling true crime drama concerning notorious Australian serial killer John Bunting, Snowtown begins as it means to go on.  Opening in a shabby neighbourhood near Adelaide, a single mother leaves her children, including sixteen year-old Jamie, alone with her boyfriend.  Little does she know, but this same boyfriend has been taking naked photographs of her boys, and when she turfs him out, a new boyfriend –jovial John Bunting – takes his place with an uneasy rapidity.  Bunting’s hatred for paedophiles, and his inability to distinguish them from homosexuals, make for some charged debate round the kitchen table, as John lends weight and purpose to the locals’ anger and disenfranchisement.  Representing a sinister sort of father figure to Jamie, Bunting’s tutelage quickly escalates from having him throw ice creams at the house of a nearby sex offender, to chucking buckets of kangaroo entrails on his front porch.  The script carefully withholds from us exactly what Bunting is doing, although we’re pretty sure that there’s more to his bravado than the bile he spits out to his friends and neighbours.  The gradual dawning of what this man is capable of is Snowtown’s ace in the hole.  Characters on the periphery of the action mysteriously disappear – including a cross-dressing informant on local sex offenders – but when Bunting reveals what he’s keeping in the garden shed, it still comes as a shock.  Told from Jamie’s perspective, we watch as he is implicated in Bunting’s acts of murder and torture.  In one particularly difficult scene, we watch as Bunting drags Jamie’s half-brother out of his bed and extracts his toenails with pliers in extreme close-up, prompting his sibling to strangle him to death, seemingly out of mercy.  The increasingly motiveless crimes are hard to watch, but it’s the implication of the community that’s particularly hard to stomach, as Bunting sidles up to each of his victims with a smile on his face only to submit them to (mostly unseen) acts of torture and suffering.  Director Justin Kurzel paints a bleak picture of working class life in South Australia, one of unspoken familial abuse and festering prejudices that Bunting’s charismatic vitriol is easily able to light to.  It’s these kitchen sink diatribes that draw you in, along with a sinking feeling of inevitability as the twisted comfort Jamie is offered away from his blighted home life completely subsumes him.  Less operatic than Animal Kingdom, Australia’s other familial crime drama of 2011, Snowtown is more difficult to pin down.  Slippery when it comes to motive, and perhaps more terrifying in its depiction of mob mentality and domestic bullying, it’s a powerful, excellent debut.

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