Part of the film’s lingering sadness comes from the knowledge that Hurley, and the police force he represents, is doing far too little, far too late. When Hurley informs the victim’s brother Charlie (Rob Collins) that he’s revisiting the case with “fresh eyes”, Charlie responds: “We needed fresh eyes 20 fuckin’ years ago.” Sometimes characters converse as if there’s vast valleys between them sometimes they cut right to the bone. The monochrome aesthetic is also a bit of a pathos-o-matic, helping the cast hit their plaintive notes. The film looks better the closer Sen’s cameras get to the ground – birds-eye drone shots, which the director has deployed before, losing their earthy lustre and becoming oddly mechanical-looking in black and white. This striking location, captured in Warwick Thornton’s vampire series Firebite, is presented by the multi-hyphenate Sen (also Limbo’s cinematographer, writer, editor and composer) in the aforementioned spartan-looking monochrome, which adds an extra layer of spareness to environments that already have a vast and empty feeling. Is it possible to maintain a circadian rhythm down there? Or is time itself stuck in limbo: never really day and never really night? In reality the central location is Coober Pedy – the bizarre South Australian town where citizens live in underground dugouts to escape the blistering heat. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning But Baker transcends stereotype, bringing sleepy-eyed and sorrowful gravitas, with lots of thousand-yard stares and a slow way of speaking, as if Hurley is aware that time moves differently in this part of the world. The addled cop is a bit of a trope: they may wrestle with the demon drink (like Aaron Pedersen in Goldstone), be afflicted by physical ailments (Brendan Cowell’s tinnitus-suffering constable in Noise) or have a traumatic, personal connection to the scene of the crime (Eric Bana in The Dry). The film is set in the titular – fictitious – opal mining town, where Hurley arrives to ask questions about the unsolved murder case of an Indigenous girl, Charlotte Hayes, 20 years before. At one point a child accurately observes that he looks more like a drug dealer than a member of the force. Simon Baker leads the cast as Travis Hurley, a tough, sorrowful, heroin-injecting detective with a buzzcut and a downbeat, Walter White-ish demeanour.
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