REFLECTIONS IN THE DUST

Australia, 2018, 75 minutes, Colour/Black and white.
Sarah Houbolt, Robin Royce Queree.
Directed by Luke Sullivan.

This is a small budget experimental drama, for a specialist audience.

Mainly filmed in black-and-white, there are colour sequences, however, with the two central characters speaking to camera, explaining themselves and their motivations. One of the characters is a younger woman, blind, disfigured teeth, wispy hair, talking about wanting to be loved and not having had the experience of love. The other character is her father, a paranoid schizophrenic, made up as a clown, talking quite frankly and directly to camera, erratic with his daughter, discussing love and her not being married, intimations of his own attraction towards his daughter and trying to deal with her, a mixture of moods and a mixture of gentle and violent behaviour.

Some of the characters move in and out, somewhat anonymous – although there is a doll, male, with the father pulling off its head, and a glimpse of a young man lying on the ground and the daughter’s attraction towards him. There is also another old man who makes comments about the girl and her parents in the past.

There are suggestions that there has been some kind of disaster, a touch of post-apocalyptic, a few survivors out in a kind of wilderness.

The film depends on the performances of the central actors and their creating figures who are sufficiently intriguing for the audience. With the sequences in colour, it means that the black-and-white photography is all the more impressive.