Sweet River

Darn it. For the first half, this felt like it was building up to be a genuinely creepy horror-mystery, of which there are too few from Australia. Tension never really gets past the first notch, however, and midway through the second half, the vibe is that of a premise that hadn't fully been thought through by the writers, resulting in a flat conclusion that was no more than a less-than-subtle metaphor for grief. What then was the point of the supernatural elements? Nice cinematography, acting is more than commendable with believable characterisations by all involved, but overall this is just a time filler.

Slow, boring film with no horror, scares, suspense or thrills. A mysterious British woman returns to a Northern New South Wales town searching to find out what happpened to her missing child. No one in the town recognises her except for the local town cop? A cast of Australian TV actors star with a Rebecca Gibney look a like British actress in this waste of a film budget and a good location.

The movie follows a great idea, and could have been great for Australian cinema, however poor scripting and editing leaves the viewer totally baffled at times as to what is going on and how each scene adds to the story attempting to be told.

The writing of this film lets it down. It's like a car that keeps trying to get up the hill but never gets there. It feels like a first draft script that needed to get pushed to a higher level, which is a shame, because you can tell everyone did their best with what they had.

'Sweet River', like the best ghost stories, is suffused with grief and mystery.

A woman moves to a small Australian riverfront sugarcane town to seek answers about the disappearance of her small son, only to find a community of grieving parents who, having lost their children to a number of tragedies, believe they are still with them. At the same time a mystery haunts the town, echoing across the canefields at night - particularly a field that stands as a memorial for the children lost and has never been harvested.

'Sweet River' is first and foremost a human drama about an outsider probing the secrets of a town - when the townsfolk don't want her to - so that she can find her son and finally allow him, and herself, to rest. The cane towers and shifts as both a backdrop and a character. It is foreboding and visceral - both the town's lifeblood and the keeper of its secrets. A river and a forest full of omens.

Beautifully acted and photographed, this film weaves a tightly knotted plot that it unravels in expertly measured beats as midway, the ghost story hinted in its opening sequence begins to take hold while the frustrations begin to mount upon Hannah as she gets closer to the truth.

Perhaps the resolution is just ever so slightly too neat (this is being very picky) and the emotional wrap-up a touch too swift to be as satisfying as the rest of the story demands. The opening sequence, like the exaggerated trailer, is also a little at odds with the tone of the rest of the film. Nevertheless, this is an accomplished, subtle, slow burn, adult ghost story that should have had the chance to find a bigger audience than it has.

One for viewers looking for something along the lines of 'The Orphanage', 'The Others', 'February (The Balckcoat's Daughter)' and 'The Devil's Backbone' rather than J-Horror and 'Children of the Corn', as the trailer would have you expect.