Limbo

Limbo

Bunya Productions

VERDICT: Ruggedly beautiful landscapes and elegant monochrome visuals help make up for a thin plot in Australian director Ivan Sen's politically charged neo-western crime thriller.

A fatalistic crime thriller clothed in classic monochrome minimalism, Limbo is the latest bleak meditation on Australia’s racist history from writer-director Ivan Sen. The son of an Aboriginal mother and Croatian father, Sen has repeatedly addressed the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians in his films, often using genre tropes to explore deeper political themes. He delivers a starkly beautiful and quietly furious story here, but the skeletal plot and monosyllabic characters are stripped to the bone, a stylised aesthetic that ends up diluting its own dramatic impact. World premiering in competition in Berlin, this elegiac “desert noir” is a visually arresting and admirably high-minded work that should make an impact outside the festival bubble, but its muted delivery will limit commercial prospects.

A remarkable indie all-rounder who writes, directs, produces, shoots, edits and scores his own films, Sen projects an impressively strong auteur voice with Limbo. Indebted to the mood and look of classic Hollywood westerns, the set-up here shares some DNA with his critically acclaimed Outback thriller Mystery Road (2013), which spawned a spin-off TV drama series. Typically for Sen, the vast lonely grandeur of the Australian landscape looms large.

Barely recognisable from his high-profile TV roles in Mindhunter and The Guardian, a shaven-haired, bearded, grizzled Simon Baker appears to be channelling Walter White from Breaking Bad here. He stars as Travis Hurley, a hard-bitten city detective on a temporary work visit to a remote mining town. A man of few words and even fewer facial expressions, Hurley is taciturn bordering on catatonic, the stereotype of laconic Australian masculinity taken to almost absurdly comic extremes. He also has a secret heroin habit and a bizarre fondness for listening to evangelical Christian audio sermons, though he does not appear religiously devout.

Checking into the Hotel Limbo, an appropriately bleak establishment carved into the rugged desert rock, Hurley grudgingly begins his task of reviewing the still-unsolved murder of Charlotte Hayes, an Aboriginal girl, in the town 20 years ago. The victim’s boozy, embittered brother Charlie (Rob Collins) initially shuns any co-operation outright: “I don’t talk to cops, especially not white ones”. His sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) proves slightly more welcoming, her initially cool reception developing a teasing, unspoken edge of romantic flirtation. But she remains suspicious of the detective’s motives, especially as he repeatedly tells the family not to expect any breakthroughs.

The original main murder suspect, a middle-aged white man with a dubious fondness for partying with young Aboriginal girls, was acquitted in court and has since died anyway. But it is obvious his brother Joseph (Nicholas Hope) is guarding ancient guilty secrets. Everybody in the town knows a tragic injustice has been committed. Nobody expects it to be fixed by a legal system so obviously weighted by class, power and gender, but mostly race.

No spoilers, but this is not a feelgood redemption story. Behind his weary film-noir pessimism, Hurley seems to have good intentions, and he makes some small positive gestures towards the victim’s surviving family. But behind these modest acts of kindness lies the bleak, overwhelming awareness of his limitations. He cannot save them from the horrors of the past, any more than he can save himself. At one point he seems to contemplate an act of vigilante vengeance, but does not act on it. The key crime in Limbo occurred decades ago, and serves here as a singularised symbol of the atrocities committed by white colonial settlers against Aboriginal peoples over centuries. No amount of cold-case reviews or karmic score-settling can heal these wounds.

Limbo is a ghost story on one level, a purgatorial drama about lost souls stranded in an oddly timeless no man’s land. Although these events notionally take place in the present day, Sen conjurs up a potent sense of time-slipping nostalgia, from the self-consciously retro associations of his elegant monochrome cinematography to the antique Dodge car that Hurley borrows during his mission. The crushing weight of history hangs over all these characters. The past is not over here, it’s not even the past.

Sen’s inspired choice of location is Coober Pedy, an opal-mining town in Southern Australia, its limitless desert vistas and deep underground shafts radiating sinister beauty on screen, especially in a handful of stunning aerial shots. The audio track is almost wholly stripped of music, relying on spare sound design and ever-present wind effects to summon up an oppressive sense of remote, melancholy, godforsaken isolation. The aesthetics of Limbo are flawless, if only Sen had given his capable cast more narrative material to work with, and a wider emotional range to explore. Stark minimalism can be very powerful as a visual style, but when applied to the plot mechanics of a suspense thriller, it proves self-defeating.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography, editing, music: Ivan Sen
Cast: Simon Baker, Rob Collins, Natasha Wanganeen, Nicholas Hope, Mark Coe, Joshua Warrior
Sound design: Thom Kellar
Producers: David Jowsey, Rachel Higgins, Greer Simpkin, Ivan Sen
Production company: Bunya Productions (Australia)
World sales: Dark Matter
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Competition)
In English
108 minutes