Sometimes the nature of paedophilia in modern society is best suited to a philosophy lecture than a court of law: what underlying personal factors have contributed; has our impermanent online culture bred the idea of disposability and anonymity; is paedophilia itself an untreatable illness or a form of sexual control? Justin Kurzel’s disturbing commentary investigates the dangerous forms of recruitment, indoctrination and vigilante law facing close-knit communities.
Set up as an extreme docu-drama towards the back end of the 1990s, Kurzel looks into the relationship between John Bunting (Australia’s most prolific serial killer, menacingly played here by Daniel Henshall), and 16 year-old Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) during the Snowtown murders in South Australia. After Bunting starts to date Jamie’s mother, the pair form a tenuous bond, held together by Jamie’s previous experiences of sexual abuse and Bunting’s “hatred” of it; and what matters most is how they go about dealing with it.
Given that it’s Kurzel’s first directorial feature, he aims to shock and unsettle, taking on not only a controversial topic, but a difficult one to cinematise effectively. The relationships between the characters hang on a knife-edge, teetering on the brink of outbreak and violence while clashing against the quiet, almost idyllic, Australian suburb. They fall into cliché at times – Bunting convincing Jamie to shave his head with him in a ritualistic form of conscription, but are heavily augmented with some purposely bloody and vicious acts of revenge. Kurzel really goes at the psychosocial structure of small-town living, and what pressures a sense of inescapability can render, creating this ominous tension lurking throughout the film which threatens to destroy the community itself. It’s the way Kurzel almost normalises this extreme vigilantism which is so piercing, neither sympathising with nor condemning the actions of Bunting and his associates, but merely pushing the boundaries of how we look at crowd mentality, social law and psychological coercion. What he’s actually crafted is a remarkable and defining examination of the darker self.