At the LFF: "Snowtown"

And you thought Animal Kingdom was hard yakka. Snowtown, Justin Kurzel's dramatisation of what came to be known as the "Bodies In The Barrels" case, opens as a deceptively low-key, naturalistic study of life in a working-class neighborhood in South Australia, some time in the late 1990s. A single mother, painfully skinny in the manner of someone who's known either the needle or the damage done, and with more kids than space to put them in, recruits a middle-aged male neighbour - an outwardly respectable type, previously seen helping the family with their weekly shop, and crafting clay pots with the mother in her poky kitchen - to look after her boys for the night. He will spend the evening taking naked Polaroids of his charges. The jaunty lilt of Tony Hatch's best-known television theme suddenly feels a very long time ago.

And Snowtown, for its part, begins to seem like a vaguely self-conscious attempt to subvert every last sunkissed image or happy-go-lucky sound we've ever come to associate with Australia as a nation. Returned to their rightful bedroom in the wake of this abuse, one of the teenagers, the sensitive Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), wakes to find his mum's new boyfriend John (Daniel Henshall) chopping the heads and tails off kangaroos, then putting their entrails in buckets; these will end up all over the pederast's front porch and lawn, once he's been released on bail. We sense the film striking out in the direction of bloody retribution, but real-life is rarely that predictable, and their target is soon observed moving out of the area, quietly, ordinarily.

Instead, the film shifts its focus onto the vacuum left behind, the void in which this family unit exists. Oldest son Troy (Anthony Groves) challenges Jamie to a living-room wrestle, that familiar test of sibling masculinity, only for their roughhousing to go - in the most literal of ways - to buggery. In the background, the television pumps out the comforting sounds of a David Boon-era cricket commentary. Jeez, what next, we might wonder - the sight of somebody getting brained with a party barrel of Castlemaine XXXX? A gang rape involving Dame Edna Everage and the group Men at Work, using Vegemite as a lubricant?

I jest, but Snowtown retains a seriousness of purpose that keeps you in its grip for a good while - the kind of seriousness that seems beyond many a British underworld thriller, for one. Jamie falls under the malign influence of John when the latter vows to make a man out of the younger party. Heads are shaved. The drug use ratchets up. Unexplained blood is spotted on bedsheets and the inside of grimy bathtubs. In brief, we begin to fear things will turn out somewhat less than bonzer. Parts of Kurzel's film are, to this end, wilfully scuzzy. Answerphone messages crucial to the plot are so poorly recorded and replayed that we struggle to make them out; one scene finds John taking in the sight of an acquaintance's plump wife whilst getting stuck into a sandwich, clumps of Mighty White hanging from his beard.

I'm not sure if blessed is the word, exactly, but Snowtown is certainly well-stocked with actors sporting the kind of grimy authenticity one might only get from holding casting calls in a skip, or by looking under a rock: the most grizzled transvestite in screen history, say, or a man whose cheeks aren't sunken so much as subsided altogether, perhaps out of a sense of disappointment that no good can ever come of himself. Kurzel gets a buzzy turn out of Henshall, who has the same still intensity one sees watching De Niro or Joe Pesci in prime-era Scorsese films: his John is a man who gives the viewer that terrible sensation that he's capable of doing anything, and at any minute.

More troubling, perhaps, is Kurzel's deployment of real-life Snowtown locals, recruited for recurring kitchen-table sequences where they've been encouraged - either pushed by Henshall in character, or by someone behind the camera - to say the foulest things they can think of in response to the idea there might be a paedophile in their midst. This seems to me a fairly high-and-mighty (not to mention hugely exploitative) way of going about illustrating and denouncing the mob mentality, and indeed too often one catches the film jabbing at our disgust buttons; it's been tooled up for a particular kind of shock value, notionally throwing up its hands at violence even as it cuts to a lingering shot of a nail being ripped from a toe.

The crux of the film is a sequence where John invites the reluctant Jamie to watch him strangling some unfortunate who's crossed the pair of them: the throttling goes on and on, sparking the walkouts of those who've managed to sit through the callous (off-screen) murder of a dog, until Jamie finally screams "just fucking do it" and rushes to himself put the victim out of his misery. I think he's supposed to be a surrogate for the viewer, who may well want the dirty work over with, and the scene intended to make some point about just how easy it is to cross a line and get sucked in, but that point is very sub-Haneke or John McNaughton, whose landmark Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a good two decades old now.

Snowtown has a good forty minutes left to go at this stage, and from then on, you really do come to feel it bashing you over the head: most viewers, even hardened critics, have emerged feeling traumatised by it, and you'll have to decide for yourself whether or not that feeling does justice to the nature of this specific case. What I will say is that the comparison with Animal Kingdom is actually a false one, for all sorts of reasons: in the earlier film, the characters were pushed towards crossroads without you seeming to notice, where Kurzel is so blunt in hammering home his themes and ideas he actually places Jamie and a friend at a literal four-ways just ahead of the final mise en abyme. The rest, compelling and problematic in equal measure, makes for a worthier successor to the likes of Romper Stomper and Chopper, two films equally beholden to the traditions of Ozploitation - and Snowtown's closest, uneasy bedfellows in that category of Films That Make You Go Strewth.

Snowtown screens at the Vue West End tomorrow (Mon 17) at 8.15, and again on Tue 18 at 12.15pm, before opening in selected cinemas from November 18.