2024 has been a quiet year for Australian film. So quiet, in fact, that a Top 10 list of the year’s releases would just about encompass every film released.
It happens from time to time; the end of the streaming boom, which saw freshly-minted digital services opening their cheque books to commission seemingly every concept that came down the pike until they came to their senses, coupled with the downturn in production due to the COVID 19 pandemic, are the biggest drivers behind the flat patch.
Add in George Miller hiring seemingly half of the industry for the extended production of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” and it’s a wonder any local product made it to nation’s cinemas at all.
By contrast, the small screen is booming – inasmuch as the Australian screen industry ever booms – with a bumper crop of homegrown drama.
We didn’t get just one retro-tinged dramedy looking back at the halcyon days of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but two: Netflix’s “Boy Swallows Universe” and Disney’s “Last Days of the Space Race,” with a third season of ABC’s ‘80s-set “The Newsreader” due in February to boot.
Crime is well-represented: “High Country” (Foxtel/Binge) and a second season of” Troppo” (ABC) have the outback covered, “NCIS: Sydney” (Paramount+/10), the local outgrowth of a seemingly never-ending franchise, polices the big smoke, and season two of Foxtel’s “The Twelve” has us sorted for courtroom histrionics – and all are more engaging than the year’s big screen tentpole procedural, the underwhelming and underperforming “Force of Nature: The Dry 2”.
And of course, we got a handful of episodes of “Bluey”, our number one cultural export, which itself is making the transition to the big screen, as was recently announced, with Disney and the BBC co-producing a feature starring the world’s favourite Blue Heeler.
Taken as a whole, the local screen industry seems to be in decent shape, even if it always perceives itself to be in some sort of existential struggle (source: any industry professional you care to talk to).
Here are ten of the best from the past twelve months: five big screen outings, five small, and all worth your attention – even if the films listed didn’t really have much competition.
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”
Anya Taylor-Joy straps on Charlize Theron’s discarded leathers and Chris Hemsworth straps on a honking great false nose for this apocalyptic prequel that tells the tale of the Imperator Furiosa up to the point where we met her in “Mad Max: Fury Road”.
With its overseas star and attendant overseas money, you could argue “Furiosa” is a movie made in Australia rather than an Australian movie, but the counterargument is simply this: it’s “Mad Max”, and that franchise belongs to us, by gum.
Maestro of mayhem George Miller delivers world class action spectacle, eye-popping visuals, and a growing sense of pomposity as only he can and, all lese aside, reminds us that, yes, Australia can make films of this scale and ambition, if we have the vision.
Sadly, audiences stayed away in droves, but that’s their loss.
“He Ain’t Heavy”
The debut feature from Western Australian filmmaker David Vincent Smith (full disclosure: he’s an old mate, but it’s a small industry and you wind up knowing everyone sooner or later) is the latest in a subset of Australian cinema I’m frankly a bit over: the heavy, depressing, addiction drama.
You know: your “Somersaults”, your “Candys”, and, on the lighter end of the scale, your “Ruben Guthries”. Smith’s film gets a pass because it’s a really good depressing addiction drama, following Leila George’s “Jade” as she undertakes a desperate plan to clean up her violent, abusive, addict brother, Max (a captivating Sam Corlett).
In short, she kidnaps him, imprisoning him in their late grandparents’ house for a dose of cold turkey and tough love. Greta Scacchi, George’s real-life mother (Vincent D’Onofrio’s her dad) is on hand as her screen mother, Bev, in what is essentially an intimate three-hander about How We Got Here and How The Hell Are We Getting Out Of Here?, methodically peeling back layer after layer to get to a place where love, however strained, can still exist.
All the usual descriptors apply: raw, uncompromising, challenging, and so on, but there’s a rare authenticity to “He Ain’t Heavy”, buoyed by excellent performances across the board and rooted in the fact that Smith was inspired by his experiences with his own addicted brother.
“Late Night with the Devil”
America-set but Australian-made, this horror gem comes to us from sibling filmmakers (gosh, we have a lot of those) Colin and Cameron Cairnes, who gave us the cracking “100 Bloody Acres” back in 2012.
Here they go the found footage route (and break the rules a bit, but every found footage film does) and present us with the (fictional) final broadcast of “Night Owls” with Jack Delroy, where our host (David Dastmalchian, one of the great “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors of the current moment), grieving over his recently deceased wife, is fronting a supernaturally-themed episode.
Will his collection of guests, including a parapsychologist, a James Randi-like skeptic, a medium, and a supposedly possessed teenager, find themselves menaced by a real threat from beyond the veil? You betcha. Is this a lovingly-crafted homage/parody of ‘70s late night TV and the Satanic Panic? You betcha. Is Don Lane spinning in his grave? Probably.
“Memoir of a Snail”
Arguably the most singular auteur currently working in Australia, Adam Elliott copped an Oscar for his 2003 claymation short, “Harvie Krumpet”, while his 2009 feature debut, “Mary & Max”, was both the first animated film and the first Australian film to open Sundance. The thing about claymation, though, is that it takes an awful long time, but Elliott’s latest was well and truly worth the wait.
A darkly whimsical, semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, “Memoir of a Snail” follows the life of snail-obsessed Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook), who is separated from her beloved twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) after the death of their alcoholic retired clown father. Elliott piles in plenty of idiosyncratic characters and details (suburban swingers, religious fundamentalists, a feeder fetish, and so many snails) that the film defies easy summation, but the emotional throughline of a young woman trying to find acceptance in a hostile and absurd world carries us through.
“Audrey”
There’s black comedy, and then there’s “suburban mum impersonates her comatose daughter to revive her acting career and find a sense of worth beyond her life of domestic drudgery” and if that log line intrigues you, make tracks for the spiky debut feature from Natalie Bailey.
Jackie van Beek (“The Breaker Upperers”) is our ambitious mum, Ronnie, who seizes the moment when her daughter, the titular Audrey (Josephine Blazier) tumbles from the roof and into a long nap, but it’s hard to dislike her – everyone hates Audrey, including her father (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor), sister (Hannah Diviney), and boyfriend (Fraser Anderson), and everyone’s lives get markedly and measurably better with the teen terror down for the count. The darkest Australian comedy to come along since “Chopper”.
“Territory”
The obvious shorthand for this six-part Netflix series is “Yellowstone but Australian”, but “Territory” ups the scale right out of the gate – the Duttons may own the largest cattle ranch in the contiguous United States, but Marianne Station, the Northern Territory patch owned by the feuding Lawson family, is the biggest in the world – take that, Taylor Sheridan.
After the heir apparent dies in a mysterious accident, a battle for succession – and there’s another series we can draw parallels with – begins, and everyone from rival cattle barons to Indigenous elders to hard-nut gangsters want a piece of the pie, to say nothing of the various fractious factions within the family.
“Wolf Creek” director Greg McLean is calling the shots here, milking the Territory’s big skies and dusty vistas for all their worth, and a sprawling all-star ensemble is on hand to act out all the dirty dealings and backstabbing, including Robert Taylor, Anna Torv, Sam Corlett (he’s having a good year), Dan Wyllie, and Clarence Ryan.
This is a pulpy meat pie western with all the trimmings – a violent soap opera dressed up as prestige TV.
“Prosper”
Religion-as-business is ripe for parody – just look at the US series “The Righteous Gemstones” for the most successful take thus far. Stan’s eight-part drama “Prosper” mines a darker and more serious vein, but it’s hard not to utter a rueful laugh at the hypocrisy and hedonism on display as Richard Roxburgh’s Cal Quinn, founder and head pastor of the Hillsong-alike Australian megachurch U Star, plans to expand his flock to the US, while battling to keep a staggering collection of scandals and secrets out of the public eye.
Drugs, infidelity, corporate malfeasance, the odd bit of dirty business – it’s all in a day’s work for this man of God, abetted by his ambitious wife, Abi (Rebecca Gibney), and mostly hindered by his adult children (Ewen Leslie, Jacob Collins-Levy, and Hayley McCarthy).
The cast is killer, but it’s Roxburgh’s magnetic turn as a horribly compromised man of genuine faith that makes this a must see. Hallelujah, indeed.
“Boy Swallows Universe”
Nostalgia, as a rule, is something to be mistrusted, and my shields went up when the first trailer for this Netflix seven-parter dropped, an adaptation of Trent Dalton’s semi-autobiographical coming of age novel. Paul Kelly and The Stems? This thing is trying to push too many obvious buttons. But it pushes them really well, and as a man of a certain age and, uh, socioeconomic background, the heightened reality of “Boy Swallows Universe” rings true – sometimes painfully true.
Young Felix Cameron is fantastic as 13-year-old Eli Bell, trying to navigate life in suburban Brisbane with an addict mother (Phoebe Tonkin), drug-dealer stepdad (Travis Fimmell), hopeless biological father (Simon Baker), and all the troubles that come with growing up in the shallow end of the criminal pool.
Managing the neat trick of being both funny and heartbreaking by turns, and sometimes at the same time, this is deft, observant Australian storytelling at its finest.
“High Country”
Leah Purcell is the city cop transferred to the back blocks in this eight-part crime drama from Binge and Showcase. That character type is standard issue in this sort of thing, but Purcell brings nuance and shading to the role of Andie Whitford, who, in a change from the usual, actually wants a quiet posting in the tiny Victorian mountain town of Broken Ridge.
What she gets is a pretty tourist trap with a very dark underbelly, including a string of disappearances hidden by a vast and troubling conspiracy.
With the lush and rainy mountains as a backdrop and the presence of a former teacher who claims to have psychic visions of the missing and murdered, there’s a touch of “Twin Peaks” to the proceedings here – but only a touch.
At its core, “High Country” is an engrossing procedural with a solid sense of place, with the Victorian highlands making a nice change of pace from the usual dry ‘n’ dusty outback setting.
“Thou Shalt Not Steal”
Writer/director Dylan River brings more than a dash of Tarantino panache to this outback yarn of desperate youths on the run. Another ‘80s-set crime caper, Stan’s eight-part series introduces us to Indigenous teenager Robyn (Sherry-Lee Watson) on the lam after busting out of youth detention to visit her dying grandfather, who teams up with Gidge (Will McDonald), the son of a travelling preacher/con man (Noah Taylor, delightfully sleazy), to track down her father, long thought dead but apparently just in hiding.
Incident piles upon incident and wacky character upon wacky character, with Miranda Otto cropping up as a vengeful madam/taxi driver and Shari Sebbens and Darren Gilshenan are a pair of AFP officers in hot pursuit.
Dexterously and deliriously plotted, heavy on laughs, and with an assured sense of style, “Thou Shalt Not Steal” is easily the most fun series of the year, never forgetting to entertain us even when its grappling with some heavy themes.