First time director Jonathan auf der Heide delivers one of the most impressive Australian film debuts in recent memory. The true story of eight convicts who escaped from their guard in 1820s Tasmania is realised as an eerie descent into hell as they are killed off one-by-one and then eaten by their remaining escapees. Demonstrating a cinematic eye to rival Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog, auf der Heide has crafted a visceral and poetic tale that, despite its nature, never descends into banality or bleakness.

In the proud tradition of Australian Gothic (ala Picnic at Hanging Rock and Walkabout), auf der Heide’s film seeks to alienate Australians from their own landscape. The primeval Tasmanian wilderness is painted in harsh, washed out tones, and the characters’ authentic Gaelic dialogue only adds to the otherness of the setting. The script by auf der Heide and Oscar Redding (who also plays the principle character Alexander Pearce) brilliantly fuses a sense of the convicts’ camaraderie with an archaic, alienating use of language. Initially the convicts sing, joke and tell tales in their new found freedom, but as their escape becomes more desperate and paranoid, their language grows increasingly opaque (“if you have no scars, the crow will eat your eyes”). In these moments of heightened lyricism it’s as if the dialogue itself achieves the quality of the image, that of an impenetrable stillness encroaching the limits of our own subjectivity.

Indeed, while the acts of cannibalism are shocking, the real violence lies in the film’s haunting stillness. Characters enter the frame rather than guide the camera, while a recurring tracking shot floats endlessly down a river, a voiceover decrying God’s absence. We are completely immersed in this world but without an endpoint. The cannibalism feels less the result of hunger than a violent response to the landscape’s vast expanse and pervasive silence (hunger itself is referred to as a “strange silence”). Indeed, the silence/stillness gradually becomes a self-consuming void (“it grows fat on itself”), encouraging a psychotic identification.  Pearce (whose confession tells the tale) repeatedly describes himself as a ‘quiet man’, yet he emerges the most violent of all the convicts.

And as silence attains an obstinate quality, sounds are strangely disembodied. Pearce is haunted by a lone “Cooeey” yelled out by a dead comrade, while his own voiceover comes less from his mind than from a disembodied consciousness (“Wasn’t the devil in you when you brought me here?”). Meanwhile, nature’s own sounds become increasingly humanised. Bird-calls evoke babies screaming, the roar of the river becomes a sign of its “anger” and leaking tree sap is hallucinated as human blood. Even the recurring sound of crackling fire eerily echoes the sound of eating heard so viscerally in the opening scene and realised so horrifically in the scenes of cannibalism. Humans may become objectified, “burning alive, like logs for the fire”, but nature/God finds itself personified, “dancing with an axe in his hand.”

In the film’s final scene, Pearce sits alone, his final victim lying dead as a shaft of light drops from the canopy. Pearce remarks on the beauty of the scene, questioning God as to why it could be so beautiful. When the film’s end titles tell us that Pearce went on to kill and eat another convict after his capture, the troubling ambiguity of this scene is realised: it’s as if in this final act Pearce has attained a new (though horrific) kind of subjectivity, a shedding of what he once was and an opening into another being. Although ostensibly done out of necessity, Pearce’s future cannibalism suggests his final act may also have been a willing one.

Review by David Marin-Guzman

Director: Jonathan auf der Heide
Screenplay: Jonathan Auf Der Heide and Oscar Redding
Cast: Oscar Redding, Arthur Angel, Paul Ashcroft, Mark Leonard Winter, Torquil Neilson, Thomas Michael Wright, Greg Stone, John Francis Howard, Jonathan Auf Der Heide, Jason Glover, Adrian Mulraney