tedg All of us want to be genuinely ourselves, and nearly all of us are at the mercy of societal imprints with urges so great we cannot escape them. Few of us can be calm in ourselves.I suppose this is one reason we seek films that are genuine and/or characters that are whole. Characters that are broken can make for good stories, but that is a different sort of compulsive draw for a film. Here, I think what this filmmaker attempted was the notion of genuine being in a genuine artifact.The *being* first. The main character here is an aborigine who as a detective can act as the unflinching driver of a procedural, the man of the earth who knows the place and people... plus the typical hero in an American western who comes into town and disrupts the gang who owns it. Other commenters like this actor and the way he moves in a modern western form.I am a viewer from the US, and I have some trouble with this. I do see the cleanliness of the project; one can appreciate the fact that the writer is also the director, cinematographer and editor. It is genuinely artisanal in that respect. But it lacks any reflection of the filmmaker's personality, as do say Clint Eastwood's films in a similar vein. It cleaves too much to an American western in fact, and for this viewer there was nothing distinctly Australian in it.Other than accent, the racists were not different than bozos within a few miles of me here. The shootout was too clean an ending for such a (relatively) complex story. So the film did not seem genuine because it gave the impression of being appropriated in nearly all respects, including the blocking.And the hero did not strike me as genuine either. I assume most Australian viewers would know the popular fictional Black Australian detective Bony who worked in the same area. He would encounter the same racist barriers but be quite a bit more intellectually deductive than our guy here. All the guy here seems to do is persist, where Bony is a sort of Poirot in tune with the land. It would have worked better with one of those amazing, unique faces, color and stride that are distinct in Oz.

irishsounds Why was I immediately sold on this movie? Within minutes I was hooked, and stayed with it 100% right through. That, in my case, is an immediate plus point for any movie.So how did it get me? I guess because it struck me as believable - the characters, the places, the story. Having visited the edge of the Auz outback I fully related to the backgrounds and the characters. The texture and feel of the presentation struck me as the genuine article. I have said it before about top quality film directing - that the feel was more like a documentary with real people and not actors.The acting was excellent but not of a fine silken quality or in any way slick. Rather the characters were raw and gritty, which could explain some review comments suggesting wooden or poor acting.This movie felt like a fly on the wall view of the hard side of a tough life in the Australian outback, replete with huge social problems, racism, and defeated and depressed people tying to survive while drugs and crime were eating into the life of the area.As depressing as was the setting, funny enough, I was not in the least depressed by the movie. There was a strong ethical line and I felt throughout that good would make it in the end.This is a great movie without any big name actors, without fancy settings, without a great musical score, without great special effects, without bells or whistles of any description. It is totally minimalist art. It's greatness is in the excellent direction, the acting, the cinematography, and a decent enough plot.

Abdul Wasey Tanweer There is a class of film lovers who want to concede and live the eras of film making. Even though they were born in situations separated by time and space, they feel nostalgic about the early and subsequent industrial era diffusion (and its effects) brought in thru history, literature and cinema: The periods when homesteaders entered Dodge City, when London started getting crawled in by villagers or when families from a big city relocated to newly planned adjoining suburbs. If you identify with this description, you've probably got a treasure here.19th century Wild West lives in 21st century Bush! Not that it's uncreative; the history of filmography is etched in this 2 hours intelligent crime story. Referencing the classic westerns to earliest neo-noirs to recent crime features, the unknown director theoretically beautifies the Film making.The score is as quiet as the life itself while as intriguing as its characters. Unbelievably well photographed! Aerial shots and silhouette wides suit the mood of terror in an uncivil, dusty town with principal actors having a gem to showcase their worth. Screen writing concerned me a bit but that doesn't stop me from saying that if given a worldwide interest, I'm sure Australia will unbland the perceptions of Australianness and allow us into new realms of cinematic and cultural entertainment.

teslavate -- I will say right from the out set that if you need a fast pace story running very quickly and smoothly from front to back this is likely not to be a movie you will enjoy. It starts out very slowly and seems to leave an awful lot to the viewer's mind to fill in. -- The movie starts out like it's going to be about racial bigotry, a native detective in a 99% white power structure working as a newly promoted detective returning home from a long absence at training and school. While he has been gone things have changed in the relatively small desert town, cocaine and methamphetamines have moved into the very rural area, as well as the labs that create it and the criminals who will do anything to anyone to protect it and the twisted pass times of the people in that trade. -- Even though it is slow moving it is very realistic in the form of a police investigation. In the USA we are used to directors spoon feeding us everything and running a very chronological story, but in real life investigative police work is often very slow and ponderous. I think maybe that is what this director was trying to express in his movie, but he comes very close to making the movie untenable for the average viewer in the USA. Maybe in Australia they are into this kind of movie. At any rate the movie IS very realistic in how a police investigation slowly progresses toward its goal. -- As you move along you start to realize that the murder in the start of the movie maybe part of it but the story is more about the depraved minds of these criminals and how the drug trade moves in and infects all levels of society and brings in levels of depravity never scene before by most citizens. Not only is there a drug trade going on but also a sick trade in underage kids and a serial killer that likes to use dogs and knives on his young female victims. -- And if you like true realism you will find the big shootout very satisfying. Having worked as a criminal investigator for +20 years and having been involved in a number of shooting I found the shoot out to be very realistic, to the point of running my adrenaline right up as I tried to shout advice. Now some will say the rifle shooting drug cop is unrealistic in that he simply sits in the open and has a long range sniper shoot out with a determined sniper, however you have to understand, and catch the clues in the movie, that this drug cop is either VERY deep under cover or on the take. In any case he is using drugs and that explains why he would sit in the open and duke it out with big bore rifles. -- However, after a very satisfying shoot out with the lowest form of criminals the movie does this weird thing I have seen in a lot of early movie making. It leaves you hanging and thinking, "What the..." because the director assumes that you see the same things he envisions but apparently doesn't bother to ask anyone else about to see if they agree. Or, the director is trying to leave a dramatic twist at the end that doesn't really do that well. -- Also, the ramification and results of this epic gun battle are left to us to try and fathom. All we see is the detective look at the bad guys faces and then he drives away from a scene in which, by my count, approximately 7 bad guys are killed by police gunfire, 1 officer is dead and 1 officer is wounded. And the survivor just drives away. Of course, or at least I hope that the director is just leaving the after effects to our imagination. If not then I really was lost and misunderstood everything. -- If you have watched the movie closely you may catch enough to sort of understand what he's aiming for in the last scene but it is not obvious. I had to watch the movie twice to catch some of the little details that didn't seem pertinent to movie the first time around. Then I finally understood that the detective is going home to his estranged ex-wife and teen daughter. -- So basically the movie starts out with a crime scene and slowly rolls toward the inevitable confrontation between good and bad. The whole movie appears to be pointed towards that goal, the confrontation, the shoot out at the OK corral so to speak. However after the great confrontation, after watching and waiting for this inevitable clash and watching it happen, the director turns the movie about and tries to make a dramatic family ending, but I don't think he laid a sufficient foundation for this to work well. There only a couple scenes about the family aspect and they weren't very detailed. -- It possibly sounds like I am trying to tear this movie apart but I really am not. As a cop who was disabled in such a confrontation as this movie I found it very interesting and I enjoyed trying to better understand it through the social differences. The actors are true professionals and the movie appears to have been made by professionals also. I would recommend it to anyone who likes who dunnits or cop movies. But it's not a family movie and it would be better going into it with open eyes..