Snowtown (2011)

Australian director, Justin Kurzel’s debut feature dramatises the grisly Snowtown or Bodies in Barrels murders that occurred in South Australia between 1992 and 1999. Victim’s remains were found in barrels of acid in a disused bank building in the small community of Snowtown, 147km from Adelaide. Of the 4 people arrested in connection with the murders, the authorities found John Bunting to be the ringleader and handed him multiple life sentences.

The story is told from the point of view of teenager, Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) as he is sucked into the bigoted and violent world of John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) and ultimately into murder. Snowtown shares similarities with Winter’s Bone (2010) showing us a bleak landscape and existence where the setting is vital enough to the mood of the story that it becomes a character in itself. The location, the run-down Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North, is grim and grey, its people jobless chain-smokers whose hopes and dreams are as beaten and empty as the streets and front yards surrounding them.

Jamie shares a bungalow with his mother and younger brothers. The family are poor in every way. They look malnourished and dirty and have a look of glazed resignation to their fate in such a hopeless place. Jamie’s mother, Elizabeth, enters one unsuitable and misjudged relationship after another and when her latest boyfriend takes indecent photos of the boys, the charismatic John Bunting comes to the family’s aid, hounding the ex-boyfriend from the neighbourhood doing everything from revving his motorbike outside the man’s house at 3am to throwing hacked and bloody kangaroo body parts on his front porch.

John and the brothers

We meet John properly in a scene at the breakfast table. Food and the idea of gathering around the table for communal meals figure a lot in this film. Snowtown, along with the ‘family meal’ scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), contorts the idea of the typical family dinner into something perverse and twisted as a broken family unit take part in a ritual intended to show togetherness.

John is charismatic and even funny. He assumes the role of father figure to the boys almost immediately and holds court at the breakfast table offering a fry-up to Jamie and showing a jolly enthusiasm that is infectious. However, behind John’s dark eyes there is a sense of menace that is truly disturbing. John easily holds the attention of those he talks to but the underlying threat of violence he carries is what keeps his audiences on their toes.

Without a father figure, Jamie is captivated by John and is attracted to and finally de-sensitized by his anti-gay and paedophile hating views. John and his cohorts, including a now brainwashed Jamie, embark on a series of brutal murders targeting gay men, those they suspect, even on hearsay, to be paedophiles, the handicapped and drug addicts.

John spreading his hate to the impressionable JamieSnowtown is a grim and upsetting film and can be hard to watch. One particularly harrowing scene involves someone being tortured and strangled in the family bathtub in what is the most shocking moment in the film. While the scene is not as graphic as it appears, it feels like it goes on for a long time and was reminiscent of other infamous sustained scenes like the underpass scene in Irreversible (2002).

Unlike more violent films intended to shock and titillate, Snowtown’s power comes from suggestion and the story it tells. Actual scenes of graphic violence are rare but like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it is the bleak world of the uneducated and hopeless that makes events so disturbing. The sunny, beach-based Australia of soap operas is turned on its head here.

There is realism within Snowtown that makes it extremely effective. Like early Scorsese films (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver) it feels like we are getting an authentic documentation of the place, its people and the events that have blighted it. Given the film dramatises real events, the decision to keep the aesthetic and acting style so natural and stripped-down feels totally right.

Every character and actor in Snowtown shares a similar haunted expression. They have the look of people with no choice but to smoke themselves into oblivion and find new ways to be angry. Aside from John Bunting, it feels like the locals who attend the vigilante community meetings and then harass and attack paedophiles do it more out of simple boredom than from any kind of real hate or agenda.

Snowtown is dark and troubling but brilliantly made and acted and is ultimately captivating. Daniel Henshall as John Bunting is terrifying and his performance alone makes the film worth seeing.