Australian filmmakers won’t let us forget the country’s darkest qualities, most recently seen in Netflix’s twisty drama The Stranger. Eliza Janssen remembers the best entries to this canon since the turn of the millennium and beyond.
The Stranger doesn’t directly adapt a true crime case to the screen, but it’s certainly easy to forget that while watching this bleak, grounded thriller.
Director Thomas M Wright was inspired by the widely circulated Daniel Morcombe case in telling the story of ‘Henry Teague’, if that is his real name: Sean Harris plays the lead role as an empty man, upon whom a whole nation’s history of violence and repression can be projected.
It’s hard to say why we Aussies can’t get enough of grim, realistic films like this—maybe our convict past and self-conscious outsider status, resurfacing as hard-to-watch reckonings on the big screen? In any case, here’s five other tremendous crime movies from Down Under that The Stranger will remind you of, whether they’re based on true, despicable events or not.
Chopper (2000)
Andrew Dominik is copping some heat for his relentlessly miserable Netflix movie Blonde: his gritty, groundbreaking biopic of Mark “Chopper” Read gets us far closer to its subject, an inarguably more shadowy and vile character. Streaked with black comedy and paranoid, oversaturated imagery, it’s a stunning directorial debut.
Animal Kingdom (2010)
As with The Stranger, it’s hard to remember that this rapturously received Aussie mob saga is a work of fiction—albeit one that draws from Melbourne’s Pettingill crime family. A dream-team of national treasures—Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, and an Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver—all put in rich and believable performances, making us viewers complicit in maintaining their corrupt family values.
Snowtown (2011)
Another debut for an Australian director who’d go onto blockbusters, another awful true story of serial killers and the enablers who create them. Justin Kurzel’s dramatisation of the 90s murders in northern Adelaide digs deep into a vulnerable follower of Daniel Henshall’s demonic killer, and doesn’t hold back from the case’s unforgettably evil details.
Mystery Road (2013)
We’ve already gone on about how Ivan Sen’s Jay Swan stories are Australia’s greatest franchise: the platonic ideal of a Meat Pie Western, whilst also bringing in simmering racial tensions and noir story structure.
Aaron Pedersen’s gimlet-eyed detective is still the King of Queensland in our introduction to the character, and there’s painful realism in the narrative of an Indigenous teen’s body bringing untold secrets to the surface of a broken community.
Hounds of Love (2016)
It was hard to leave some of the terrific Australian horror hits off this list (sorry, Wolf Creek and The Loved Ones), but this 80s-set abduction thriller based on the Moorhouse Murders belongs here. The torture is hard to watch, of course, but more sickening is the film’s psychological focus: the kidnapper’s codependent belief that what they’re doing is perfectly logical.
Consider the success of these bleak Australian stories overseas, and how modern audiences keep returning obsessively to unbelievable evils of the past: maybe we’re buying into that dark reasoning, too.
