6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 3.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.3 |
Indigenous cowboy detective Jay Swan returns to his outback home town, to solve the murder of a teenage girl, whose body is found under the highway trucking route out of town. Alienated from both the white dominated police force and his own community, including his teenage daughter, who he discovers is connected with the murdered girl, Jay stands alone in his determination to fight back for his town and his people.
Starring: Aaron Pedersen, Hugo Weaving, Ryan Kwanten, Jack Thompson, Tasma WaltonThriller | Insignificant |
Crime | Insignificant |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
English SDH
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
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.
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'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.
- The Story (1080p; 3:58)
- High Profile Cast (1080p; 4:46)
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.
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