Maven's Nest
Reel Life: Flick Pix
A cop and an Indigenous family lift their cold case and themselves out of limbo in an Australian moonscape of black-and-white.
By Nora Lee Mandel
Limbo
Writer/Director/Cinematographer/Editor/Composer: Ivan Sen
Producers: David Jowsey, Rachel Higgins, Greer Simpkin and Ivan Sen
Australia. 104 mins. Not Rated.
With: Simon Baker, Rob Collins, Natasha Wanganeen, Nicholas Hope, Mark Coe and Joshua Warrior
Released in New York and Los Angeles theaters on March 22, 2024, national release follows, by Music Box Films
The fictional town of Limbo seems located deep in auteur Ivan Sen’s psyche. While the plot is similar to Australian Lucas Taylor’s mini-series Black Snow (2022, shown in the U.S. on Sundance Channel last year), Sen was inspired by incidents in his own Indigenous family. Limbo draws on elements of his earlier work - the fractured Indigenous family in Toomelah (2011), and the “Outback Noir” of action films Mystery Road (2013) and Goldstone (2016).
The last film I reviewed that was also shot in South Australia’s Coober Pedy was Peter Cattaneo’s colorfully family-friendly Opal Dream (2006). But multi-hyphenate Sen’s cinematography, from above, below, wide horizons and inside shafts, is in a black-and-white that makes the mined earth look like a moonscape through sharp night vision. His striking aesthetics also symbolizes the characters’ physical and emotional isolation.
Like Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and In The Heat of the Night (1967), an outsider comes to a small town to ostensibly investigate a crime, and really the community. From when Simon Baker’s tattooed, drug-addicted “Travis Hurley” enters the caves of the Limbo Motel, the phlegmatic detective does not want to raise anyone’s hopes that he can solve the cold case of Charlotte Hayes, an Indigenous girl who went missing 20 years ago. Yet he needs her family’s cooperation if he’s to determine that there was anything about the situation that merits more attention.
Her traumatized “Hayes” family has been left in limbo since her disappearance. Her brother “Charlie” (Rob Collins is a powerful presence) lives alone in a trailer on a ridge, and has had no positive experiences with police. Her sister “Ema” (Natasha Wanganeen) is worn out taking care of his sharp-talking (locally cast) kids plus her daughter, working at the local café, and literally scraping together, from opal findings, enough money for them to live. Witnesses and suspects have died, and the cop is about to leave in frustration.
But as “Hurley” persists in follow-up, the locals gradually trust him enough to lead him around dirt roads and the aboriginal language to the truth. On an old tape player in the police files, “Hurley” can now listen to the interrogations from their point-of-view. He can hear how law enforcement’s racist assumptions and aggression colored the questioning, and he begins to sympathize with the alienation of those who could have helped.
Feeling how his own complicity in this system damaged him, “Hurley” helps the family to try healing them all out of limbo. There is only a hint of a Hollywood ending within this authentically Australian environment.
3/22/2024
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists and for Jewish film festivals. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
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