Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Mystery Road Blu-ray Movie Review

Where the green ants murder each other.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 14, 2014

The Australian Outback has been the setting for some fascinating cinematic examinations of the clash of cultures between interloping Caucasians and native Aborigines, in films as disparate as Walkabout and Where the Green Ants Dream. Celebrated Australian director Ivan Sen (Beneath Clouds), himself the progeny of one Aborigine and one European parent, paints a somewhat different clash of cultures in the languorous but often quite compelling Mystery Road. In an Outback that more resembles the American Southwest, replete with an economically depressed and socially outcast native population, Sen weaves a story of a newly minted Aboriginal detective named Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen) who is tasked with uncovering what happened to a local Aboriginal girl who is found murdered under an isolated highway overpass. Swan soon finds himself neck deep in a number of interrelated issues, including possible police corruption, long simmering distrust between the (white) settlers and the natives, and just for good measure twin related problems with drugs and prostitution. Mystery Road is often a very slow moving film, content to let scenes play for quite a while with little other than an awesome Australian sunset and occasional rustle of wild birds filling the frame, suggesting a kind of Australian version of John Ford’s love of similarly panoramic non-narrative shots of Monument Valley in his many westerns. In fact, Mystery Road is probably more of a modern day western than a traditional police procedural, right down to the fact that Swan, the putative hero of the piece, wears a stiff white hat.

One of the next films in my review queue is another film which once had "mystery" in its title, the patently odd 1960 Cinerama feature Holiday in Spain, which some may know began life as the even odder Scent of Mystery. Scent of Mystery was a film which contained a gimmick called Smell-O-Vision (which is exactly what it sounds like) that could have erupted from the febrile imagination of William Castle (it was evidently actually Mike Todd, Sr.), where aromas were pumped into the theater to simulate smells characters in the film might be experiencing. Smell-O-Vision might have helped to explain an early plot point in Mystery Road that initially seems completely foolhardy. A trucker pulls off to the side of an isolated two lane highway in the barren Australian wilderness to check his tires, but soon hears some growling from a wild animal. In what seems to be a completely dunderheaded act, he then takes off into the scrub in the direction of the sound. It’s only later that it’s revealed that he smelled something peculiar, and that smell turned out to be the corpse of a young Aboriginal girl.

The girl’s ethnicity is evidently the main reason Swan is called onto the case, although Mystery Road never really deals with this explicitly. Instead, an obvious racial divide is more than capably evoked in some of the early interchanges Swan has with his Anglo counterparts, including elderly Sarge (Tony Barry), the force’s commander. Part of what keeps a low level of tension quite evident throughout Mystery Road despite its slow, deliberate pace is the fact that the viewer is never quite sure who’s on Swan’s side and who is plotting against him.

That aspect is probably best portrayed through the character of Johnno (Hugo Weaving), a seemingly slightly unhinged detective who is supposedly on some deep undercover assignment, but whom Swan suspects of some possibly criminal activity. There are a couple of completely unsettling showdown scenes between Johnno and Swan where nothing violent happens, and not even any overt threats are voiced, but the conflict between the two is virtually palpable.

Swan’s investigation leads him all over the place, including to his estranged wife Mary (Tasma Walton) and daughter Crystal (Tricia Whitton). He also begins to stalk a shady kid named Pete (Ryan Kwanten) who is the son of a local farmer and may be colluding with some of the police in illegal activity. Ultimately a huge drug haul is involved, and the many strands of Mystery Road’s plot are tied together in a fascinatingly staged shootout scene that doesn’t employ any Peckinpah-esque slow motion effects but still seems to unfold in some slightly altered temporal universe where things don’t unfold at the expected rate.

There’s a kind of rote aspect to some elements of the denouement in Mystery Road which tend to undermine some of the generally compelling scenes which have come before. The “mystery” part of this film is frankly not as interesting as the pure character drama, with Pedersen doing a really admirable job at depicting Swan’s low key, tamped down persona that nonetheless is out to attain justice no matter what the cost. The Australian setting is incredible in the film, offering a kind of bleak, barren backdrop to lives that seem to be perpetually on the tipping point of crisis.

Mystery Road Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Mystery Road is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Sen lensed this film himself (he also composed the score, did the editing, and presumably provided craft services as well) and the result is a sharp but sometimes bleak looking offering, one that while dealing in color has a certain noir quality in terms of the play of light against shadow. Close-ups reveal some spectacular levels of fine detail (see screenshots 1, 5 and 8), and even midrange shots offer great nuanced views of the dusty Australian locales. A lot of the film is bathed in a kind of amber hue, something that slightly mitigates levels of detail at times. The only real issue here is with some slight but persistent banding, something that regularly crops up when Sen films directly into things like a startlingly orange-red Australian sunset.

Mystery Road Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Mystery Road's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is wonderfully immersive, though quite subtly so quite a bit of the time. What's notable about the sound design is how spacious it all is. A brief rustle of wind with accompanying dust, or the sudden howl of a far off dog which is discretely placed in a side channel suddenly open up the sonic ambience wonderfully from its otherwise kind of cloistered state courtesy of small scale dialogue scenes. Dialogue and Sen's score are both delivered impeccably, with excellent fidelity and no issues of any kind.

Mystery Road Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of consists of two brief featurettes, both of which have the honesty to label themselves "EPK":

  The Story (1080p; 3:58)

  High Profile Cast (1080p; 4:46)

• Interviews With Cast (1080p; 20:21) include separate sit downs with Aaron Pedersen, Hugo Weaving, Ryan Kwanten, Jack Thompson and Tony Barry.


• Trailer (1080p; 2:13)

Mystery Road Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Mystery Road might try a bit too hard at times with "arty" metaphors and some odd directorial choices (what's up with those cutaways to scrub during the examination of the girl's corpse in an early scene?). But the basic storyline is quite fascinating, especially with regard to the interplay between the "natives" and the European settler class. Performances are top notch and the final, extended shootout is one of the most impressively staged scenes in a crime thriller in recent memory. Not quite a home run but still one of the most idiosyncratic and generally compelling character studies to come down the pike in quite a while, Mystery Road comes Recommended.