On Thursday night, Revolver Entertainment marked the release of Snowtown with a screening of the film, a live Tweet-along and a Q&A with its director Justin Kurzel. Snowtown is a depiction of the real life murders that happened in the nineties in the town close to Adelaide. The film is told from the point of view of Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), an abused teen that becomes embroiled into the world of John Bunting (Daniel Henshall), an outwardly personable man who also happens to be a sadistic murderer.
The film is relentlessly tense (aided by Jed Kurzel’s outstanding score) and oppressively bleak. It is at times almost impressionistic and its use of oversaturated imagery adds to the near-dreamlike quality of the film. Whilst much of the violence is left unseen, what we do witness is so gut-wrenchingly inhumane it’s physically difficult to watch. I had to duck out for a quick breather after a particularly nasty bit involving a toenail and some pliers.
The cast of Snowtown are universally excellent and Pittaway and Henshall particularly so. Pittaway doesn’t seem to really domuch, but it’s his character’s curious passivity from which we must decide how culpable he is in the crimes the film depicts. It’s a reasonably complex performance. Henshall is perfect as the monstrous Bunting, a man able to worm his way into the lives of those he abuses and of those he would have join him in abuse with his veneer of charm.
After the screening, we were given a few moments to recover before Justin Kurzel took our questions. You can listen to the recording of the Q&A at this location. Listen out for questions from Midnight Video’s (a podcast you really should be listening to) Phil Walsh and HeyUGuys’ Adam Lowes.
You can read a Storify of my tweets from the event here.
On Saturday morning, I was invited to go to the Corinthia Hotel to take part in round table interviews with the cast and crew of the forthcoming John Carter. My previous experience of round table interviews suggested I’d probably get around twenty minutes at best with a couple of actors or crew members, but to my surprise, the assembled journos and myself were put into small groups and got a good twenty-five minutes or so each with Lynn Collins, Taylor Kitsch, Andrew Stanton, Willem Dafoe and the film’s producers, Lindsey Collins and Jim Morris.
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