Director Steven Vidler's film of the Nick Enright play is emotionally weightless. Vidler seems so concerned to make it relevant to the teen generation it's about that he has made what reads as an extended music video complete with a loud soundtrack, an abundance of surfing footage, orange tinting and shorthand editing. It's shocking to see the indifference he applies to the character of the girl who is raped and murdered though this superficiality extends to all the characters.
The material originated as Property of the Clan for the stage but Enright reworked it for a larger theater company, doubling the cast and I feel losing the purity of his intention. This re-drafting is exemplified by creating a cancer crisis which really has no impact on the base story.
Enright's comment on male aggression which is meant to explain the violence is echoed in the protagonist Jared (Laurence Breals) delivering a climactic speech about `mates is all you got' though it rings false when he is shown to have an interest in photography and a girlfriend.
The actors have little to work with and Vidler winds them up to a level of hysteria so that the strine accents and performances by Simon Lyndon, Chris Haywood and David Field are simply ludicrous. Breals performance is all about his hair and Linda Cropper as his mother is stranded. Vidler thankfully deprives us of footage of the murder but repeats flashbacks of the rape as Jared's conscience, though his long range witnessing becomes closeup memory.
