Ringan Ledwidge’s Gone has the auspicious distinction of being that other annoying-backpackers-getting-themselves-in-too-deep-murder-and-mayhem-amongst-the-shitbergs-and-outback-of-Australia-flick; released in the unexpectedly looming shadow of Greg Mclean’s chart topping and blood lettingly sadistic torture-porn downunder  flick Wolf Creek, and relegated to short run theatrical and easy-to-ignore dvd release, Gone came second in 2007’s two film outback psycho thriller race. Why? A combination of less grandstanding, more interest in character, and actually not being all that good pretty much collectively sealed the deal, most would say…

Gone revolves around Alex (Shaun Evans), a British backpacker in Australia. We know he’s a backpacker because he spends the first ten minutes of the film reading Lonely Planet. Over and over again. He seemingly needs to refer to it even before he gets out of the airport, just to check where the skybus might be.

Within a short time of arriving, he’s already missed the bus to Byron Bay (an event which, despite spending the entire opening of the film with him exclusively, we don’t see, isn’t captured, and is merely elliptically alluded to on a phone conversation), and heads to the city for a night of reckless abandon, namely sitting on the steps of his backpackers, reading the Lonely Planet. It’s here, looking like the world’s biggest easy take, that Alex meets Taylor (Scott Mechlowicz) an allegedly smooth talking American who ushers in a morning-after-the-night–before with a couple of boozed up travellers, one of whom Alex comes to next to in the middle of a park; the occasion being captured for posterity via Taylor’s schtick, which is to capture the people he meets (manipulates/assaults) via polaroid. The two embark on a precarious friendship born out of some convenience, some personal corruption, and some passive-aggressive persistence on Taylor’s side, and set off to Byron, to pick up Alex’s actual girlfriend, Sophie (Amelia Warner), and then on to adventures and manipulations. Taylor, of course, with said photo in his possession, is a walking hotbed of not-so-subtle manipulations, emotional blackmail, and the usual dastardly intentions, as the gang’s holidaymaking strays somewhere not quite so fun.

The film treads a pretty familiar genre path, which is that of an outsider that maliciously burrows themselves in between the normal marital/family/relationship/friendship-type workings of a group of ‘innocents,’ who in some way, are revealed as less than innocent thanks to some passing flaw or ill-judged indiscretion, and madman-justice visited upon them. Think of a whole slew of early nineties films, like ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,’ ‘Poison Ivy,’ ‘Unlawful Entry,’ and many more along those lines. Here, Taylor represents a vicarious, projected sort of revenge, thrown on to Alex’s girlfriend Sophie with moral justification, caused deliberately by his own construction. It’s a (too) familiar ploy imposed upon a what is a road movie genre film, a traveling bag of less-than-trickery.

To work, the story relies on whether we’ll believe that Alex and Sophie would willfully remained tethered to Taylor when they could leave him without a word at anytime, and the film does go into overdrive, throwing as many reasons at us as it can: ostensible friendship, a sense of obligation, a sense of disappointment, a sense of guilt at making Tylor an unwitting audience to them having sex. At times, the enforced sense of connection can come off as a hard ask.

And for a film that is entirely set in Australia, traveling through Sydney, Byron, into outback territory, Gone goes to deliberate lengths to resist observing, contextualising or integrating location into the story it’s telling, homogenizing any details which could otherwise give the story distinction or a point of difference into the hammered out flat plane of commercial thrillerdom. For all it matters to the actual storytelling, Australia could have been substituted with any country internationally, and the only thing that would change in the entire script would be the scenery. Someone says g’day (out of shot) in the first quarter of an hour – wait half an hour, and there’s kangaroo as roadkill. And that’s it. There are no significant Australian characters, or really any minor characters to speak of in the entire movie.

The intention here seems to be to create an insular, traveling set piece between the four characters, to extract a kind of claustrophobia or traveling cabin fever, but which ultimately feels contrived and reductive, and primarily at odds with the pure expanse of the outback terrain that it describes. Rather than achieving its intention, the film feels like it’s in the business of selling itself short, delivering something to the lowest common denominator against the opportunities it clearly has on display to resist that.

However, Ledwidge does have the good judgement to keep Gone’s primary moments of violence of screen in an effort to try to focus on the tension and mechanism of his main players; likewise, he is obviously interested in the power of suggestion as to Alex’s past and his motivations (although the scene which presents this would have benefited from some underplaying) and these things certainly add an air of credibility and argue for his interest in the elements of character in the story. But overall, the expectation of this being an involving character thriller is totally dependent on reacting to the characters in a way that transgresses the usual two dimensional thriller machinations, which here constantly and clumsily overpower the flickers of interest and insight the film tries to foreground.

As a psycho thriller playing it out a familiar set of conventions with, y’know, outback stuff in the background, Gone remains a forgettable diversion.

Review by Al Cossar

Director: Ringan Ledwidge
Screenwriters: Andrew Upton and James Watkins
Cast: Scott Mechlowicz, Ameila Warner, Shaun Evans, Yvonne Strzechowski, Victoria Thaine, Zoe Tuckwell-Smith
Australian theatrical release date: July 19, 2007