OUTBACK
Australia, 2019, 86 minutes, Colour.
Lauren Lofberg, Taylor Weise, Brendan Donoghue.
Directed by Mike Green.
It is a pity not to be able to support the first feature film of an aspiring filmmaker. While the photography is fine, the plot has touches of the absurd, the characters very difficult to like or empathise with.
The film opens at Sydney airport with a couple of arriving from the United States, he having proposed but, at the airport, quite some tension between the two. And this continues throughout the film, making audiences wonder why they were together, what brought them together, what they have in common, the disturbing tension between them. They hire a car, look at a map, decide to drive to the beach where he is reluctant to have a swimming, then relents seemingly over cheerfully, is bitten by jellyfish which has some dire consequences.
They decide to go to Guru, the screenplay giving information that seems that it is far closer to the East Coast of Australia and actually is. Off they go, relying on the GPS which then deceives them and takes them into all kinds of back roads. And, while their behaviour has been somewhat stupid so far and their clashes and their treatment of the man’s jellyfish sting, what they do next is, as some of the bloggers say, “idiotic”. In polite terms one might say they show no common sense, wandering out into the outback, losing their sense of direction, not knowing how to get back to the car, he going out to search, returning while the young woman is bitten by a scorpion and goes into a kind of coma.
There are unpreparedness for this visit to the outback is appalling.
The film runs for only 86 minutes, is rather prep repetitive, he wandering round and searching, eventually finding the car, but dying. She revives, wanders, trying to eat some berries, thirsty, finding the car and her boyfriend dead. She finds the ring. She has the camera and has taken a great deal of footage, thinks about her mother, a kind of farewell – until she is found in saved.
Allegedly based on fact, even at the beginning using the word “legend” which dignify is the proceedings extraordinarily. Overall, a disappointment in Australian filmmaking – and not very flattering to naive Americans coming to visit.
