Simon Baker plays a ruined cop investigating a cold-case murder in this tough, sandblasted thriller that coolly lays out the racism and discrimination the Indigenous population face
ndigenous Australian film-maker Ivan Sen brings to Berlin a terrific outback noir, a cold-case crime procedural that he has written and directed – and also shot in a stark monochrome, which makes the vast skies and cratered earth of South Australia’s abandoned opal mines look like another planet.
The setting is the town of Umoona, where a grizzled cop arrives, broodingly listening to a Christian talkshow on the car radio, and checking into a place unsubtly called the Limbo Motel, where his room is a bizarre stone grotto, apparently repurposed from one of the disused mines. This is detective Travis Hurley, played in careworn, weatherbeaten style by Simon Baker – very much resembling Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.
Nobody in authority, then or now, has the smallest interest in solving this case, but Hurley takes it seriously. He talks to the missing woman’s brother Charlie and sister Emma , and tracks down Joseph , a “whitefella” who had some involvement in dubious parties to which Indigenous men and women in those days were invited. Sen and Baker show how something in Hurley’s own terrible loneliness, emotionally ruined state and fractured family background resonates with the people he talks to.
Sen coolly lays out for us the reality of the racism and casual discrimination to which the Indigenous population are subjected to – especially, but not solely, when it is police business. Their stoicism is revealed when the people Hurley approaches perhaps figure that, since nothing is going to get done, there is nothing obvious to lose and perhaps some therapeutic closure to be gained in talking to this wrecked-looking cop.
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