Rob Collins

Limbo

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Travis and Emma sitting in a car

Old wine in new bottles, Limbo is a case – a jeroboam? – of the familiar served up in a starkly different way. A desert noir, an Outback noir more specifically, it’s the latest from Ivan Sen, whose Mystery Road about ten years ago opened up this territory. Now he exploits it, with a savage, scorched-earth aesthetic, in a story about a troubled cop – wrecked marriage, bit of a drug problem – rocking up in a remote Outback town to open the books on the unsolved murder of a local aborigine girl, though the nearest you get to the word “aborigine” in this film is “black fella”. Mystery Road had more or less … Read more

The Drover’s Wife

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Molly with a rifle

Leah Russell stars, writes, directs, produces and plunders her own family history for The Drover’s Wife (aka The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson), a fine-looking revisionist western set in the Australian Outback. Russell plays Molly, it almost goes without saying to say, a woman left to fend for herself and her kids out in the back of beyond while her husband is away droving sheep up in the high country. Handy with a gun but with a tendency to shoot when the red mists descend, Molly may be suffering from a form of PTSD, as no one back then ever called it. It’s writer/director Russell’s first fictional feature (she’s done some … Read more