NateWatchesCoolMovies Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne is as haunting as motion pictures get, and hasn't left my thoughts since I saw it in a small independently run cinema some ten years ago. When a film is set in Australia, you know right of the bat it's going to have an eerie, striking story to tell. It's a vast, lonely place in areas, full of secrets and unexplored areas. Gabriel Byrne finds himself in a tricky situation of his own doing, playing an Irishman living in a small, isolated fishing village deep in the mountains. While on an expedition with his mates, he comes across something harrowing along a desolate stretch of river: the body of a murdered aboriginal girl. Here's where he makes a fatal mistake.. instead of reporting it instantly, he continues over the weekend with his trip, waits until he's back in town and then notifies the authorities, leaving her right there in the water. Once the details emerge, this causes a royal nightmare of controversy, racial tension and upset, including his wife (Laura Linney) who is horrified by the borderline inaction on his part. Was he wrong? Definitely. These snap decisions during times of great stress are common though, reactionary function not always falling into the place of logic, resulting in a mess such as this. Now as you can tell by my review, most of the film focuses on his actions and their repercussions, not so much on who killed the girl, or why. We see her in an unnerving prologue on some faraway highway, lured to a rest stop by a mysterious trucker, and then we see her alive no more. The trucker appears again throughout the film on the fringes of the main story, but never are we given clarification or catharsis to the murder side of the plot. That to me is an ultimate mood setter and thorn in the side of resolution. The cumulative result of her being found is simply an unrest hanging over the region like a blanket of uncertainty, matters only clouded further by Byrne and the storm he created by not acting right off the bat. Uncomfortable viewing, but beautifully made and not a film one soon forgets after viewing.

craig-hopton The movie had a really good concept. It's about race division in Australia, but more importantly it's an exploration of how a small, innocent decision (not immediately reporting a murdered body) can turn out to look malicious and divisive in hindsight, and the repercussions this can cause.My problem with this Jindabyne is that these themes were kind of taken over by the focus on the lead female character Claire and her mental and emotional issues, which didn't really work for me.There's also a very bizarre subplot where the movie shows you the movements of the murderer but this never seems to lead to anything. It creates an air of menace at first but then just becomes rather pointless. The police don't seem to have any leads to follow and so the opportunity of this becoming an engaging crime-detective drama comes to nothing.I may have just missed the point of this movie but it didn't do it for me.

Mike Rice Producers import two actors often seen in American films to spice up a Raymond Carver story transported to its new setting in Oz. I now remember a variation of this story from Robert Altman's Raymond Carver based film Short Cuts.I saw this on DVD, not in a theater. Five minutes were missing. I wondered if they were what must have been an awful rape scene? The murderer needed so badly to be caught and there were so many ways he should have been, so why not do what the audience wants and try to capture the rapist at least comes the dawn.I'm a little disappointed. I fell in love with the Oz movies when they started appearing in the late seventies. Let me give you a couple you can really chew on: Breaker Morant and Heart of the Stag. I recently made an extraordinary effort to get Heart of the Stag and succeeded. I asked for it ten months ago on Netflix and it wasn't found. Then in late summer I looked again and there it was.Jindabyne's a good film. Laura Linney is fine. I didn't have much respect for the other fishermen and their wives, or the husband played by Gabe Byrne either, even at the end. The movie owned a hard reality. One more thing: the way these Oz working men and their wives dressed is just putrid. The worst are those colorful coveralls Gabe Byrne wore at the office and eventually, everywhere.

no_we_are_not The premise for this film is fantastic: four guys discover a dead body on a fishing trip... on that level it's mysterious and intriguing and a super platform for developing any number of themes. This was why I watched the film. Also on a positive note: the performances are generally good, it's shot very well and the locations are beautiful.The problem is, the film is very very badly written - it lacks identity and consistency developing its themes and the result is an in-cohesive and confusing mess, and the considerable potential is not realised in any area.A story is meant to serve its audience. At its core this film (when it eventually makes its mind up) is a drama about a community divided on race lines by the fishermen's failure to report the discovery of the dead black girl immediately and in the appropriate manner.It is just completely unbelievable that this community would be so exercised over this matter, yet by all appearances completely indifferent about the actual rape/murder of this girl - which the audience might reasonably conclude to be the work of a psychopathic serial killer still at large within the community.Far too much time is wasted deliberately misleading the audience into believing that this story is going to be about the killer, or the murder case, or even the abnormal 7 year old girl seemingly obsessed with the occult. For example, mid-film we learn the killer has the victim's car in his barn - what purpose does this scene serve other than to confuse? What does the film gain from the murder of the class guinea pig (incredibly, another crime which attracts a more moral outrage from the characters than the rape/murder of the girl the men find!)?The consequence is that not enough time is put into developing any of the characters, who end up feeling very clichéd and one dimensional. There's almost none of the debate about what to do with the body, which is surely at the heart of developing the 4 central male characters. There's only the most superficial examination of the aboriginal reaction - the expected knee jerk 'they wouldn't have done it if it was a white girl', followed by reprisals and then sustained anger... with the reconciliation in the final scene feeling completely out of place next to the 2 hours which preceded it. If this was to be the central theme of the film, these characters should've been developed far more fully and thoughtfully. Instead, the result is flimsy, glib, illogical, unresolved, insensitive and offensive. And this is Australian cinema at its best? Don't waste your time, it's atrocious.