Alright,
so as promised on other forms of social media, I said I'd start doing a weekly movie critique on here and today's movie is one I watched 2 nights ago called, "Snowtown".
Based on actual events,
Snowtown takes place in the Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North, 16-year-old Jamie lives with his distressed mother and his brothers — including Troy, who rapes Jamie. One day, his mother's boyfriend takes indecent photographs of the boys. When the police are reluctant to intervene, Elizabeth is contacted by Barry (Richard Green), a gay man who introduces her to John (Daniel Henshall). John, who despises pedophiles and homosexuals, deals with the boyfriend by continually harassing him until he leaves town. John begins to assume the role of Jamie's father figure.
Jamie finds himself slowly drawn into John's homophobic and violent tendencies, unable to escape because of his charismatic and intimidating dominance. On one occasion, he has Jamie shoot his dog. John meanwhile influences the rest of the neighborhood with his extremely homophobic views, and separates Barry from his younger boyfriend Robert (Aaron Viergever). Only Troy seems to dislike John. Barry soon disappears, leaving behind only a tape saying that he is going to Queensland.
Shortly afterward, Jamie visits his drug-addicted best friend Gavin (Bob Adriaens) with John, who takes a dislike to Gavin. Later one night, John and Robert take Jamie into his garden shed and show him the bodies of Barry and Gavin. Distressed, Jamie lashes out at John but is powerless to resist, and remains under his influence. When John learns that Jamie has been abused by Troy, he and Robert torture Troy. Jamie later kills the brutalized Troy in an act of mercy. Now desensitized, Jamie assists John in carrying out several murders. John and his team store the bodies in the vault of an abandoned bank in the town of Snowtown.
Jamie is persuaded by John to lure his half-brother Dave (Beau Gosling) to the bank building, ostensibly to look at a computer for sale. Jamie drives with him to the town, vaguely conscious of what he is doing, and leads Dave into the building, where he is met by John and Robert. Unaware of what is going on, Dave watches Jamie shut the door of the bank.
Against a black screen, captions reveal that South Australian Police discovered the remains of eight people stored in barrels in the bank vault of Snowtown on 20 May 1999, and, the following day, John Bunting and Robert Wagner were arrested.
So now that you know what the movie is about, here's my honest review.
Snowtown is a very hard film to watch. Though most of the film is implied, the rape scene of Troy and Jamie is not, and the film simply puts a very disturbed feeling in your stomach the entire time you watch the film. The actors are all so believable it's terrifying. Though this is not the most disturbing film I've ever seen, it definitely is one I don't think I could watch over and over as it is a film that knows exactly how to upset it's viewers and really make you feel for Jamie and want to kill for him. Throughout this film I kept wanting to see Jamie finally kill John for all the torment John has caused and how he tortured Jamie by forcing him to watch them torture his brother Troy.
All in all this wasn't as hard to sit through as I figured it'd be, but it was definitely not an easy movie to watch.