There seem to be only two certainties about contemporary, non-Indigenous Australian films: they will be dark and unpleasant, and greeted with exaggerated enthusiasm that quickly subsides into silence. The latest movie to test this thesis is Birdeater, written and directed by Jack Clark and Jim Weir, which won the audience award at last year’s Sydney Film Festival.
There’s a strong whiff of ‘arthouse’ about this film, which is shot from a bewildering array of camera angles, with equally arty editing and gothic lighting. It begins with a hazy sequence in which two young people appear to be madly in love. Lots of staring rapturously into each other’s eyes, grappling beneath the sheets… I could have sworn there was vaseline on the camera lens.
Yet there is something disturbing in the way the young man, Louis (Mackenzie Fearnley), makes excuses to slip away and hit a gold ball in the night, while his girlfriend, Irene (Shabana Azaz), is zonked on sleeping pills. This will be clarified as an extreme case of separation anxiety. Irene simply can’t bear to be apart from Louis, at least while she’s conscious.
As the couple plan to formalise this obsessive relationship, Louis will undergo the ritual of a buck’s party. The novel aspect is that he’s taking Irene along to this traditionally all-male affair. To keep her company, Louis’s friend, Charlie (Jack Bannister), is bringing his girlfriend, Grace (Clementine Anderson). The other attendees are Murph (Alfie Gledhill), who’s into all things cosmic; and Dylan (Ben Hunter), just back from a long trip to Mexico. The venue is a cottage in remote bushland. As the party gets under way, another guest turns up. This is Sam (Harley Wilson), who may or may not have been a former boyfriend of Irene’s – magnaminously invited by Louis.
And that’s it. Seven people thrown together for a party in the bush, to celebrate the end of Louis’s bachelorhood. A poster for Wake in Fright, prominently displayed on a wall, has already given us an unsubtle hint where this weekend is heading.
Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971) – set to be reprised at this year’s Melbourne Film Festival in a new print – was a frightening exploration of a culture of toxic masculinity. Birdeater, a title that suggests a huge spider, is a more intimate affair, a chamber piece performed by a mismatched group of friends in an isolated setting. The personality mix seems highly improbable: Charlie and Grace are devout Christians, saving themselves for marriage, while Sam is happy to discuss his promiscuity. Murph is a marriage celebrant and a bit of a hippy, but Dylan is an aggressive misanthrope, hell-bent on attacking and humiliating everyone else – especially Louis, whose ‘nice guy’ persona acts as a constant provocation.
Ben Hunter’s Dylan would be a scene-stealer if he wasn’t such a psycho – demanding Louis drink another beer, revving up the personal insults and vulgarity to the limits. As for Charlie, his Christian credentials are soon exposed as threadbare. But it’s Louis who becomes the most problematic character. He seems the caring, mild-mannered type, but Dylan is pushing a different version. His apparently loving relationship with Irene is described as one long “date rape”. Irene, who seems happy to spend her life addled on medication, is accused of merely wanting to get married to help with her visa requirements.
The conversations get progressively uglier as Louis’s backstory is revealed, including the reason he has a huge scar on the side of his head. Meanwhile the friends, led by the diabolic Dylan, are determined not to let the bridegroom off the hook at his own bachelor’s party, even if the girls are present. The relentless spiral into mayhem would be more chilling if it wasn’t so predictable, and the characters themselves so improbable.
Maybe it’s just me, but I found it difficult to believe anyone would hold a buck’s party with five boys and two girls in a shack in the bush. It’s equally hard to accept that God-fearing Charlie and Grace could tolerate this arrangement. Dylan’s behaviour alone should have been enough to send everyone running for the hills, but they are bizarrely willing to team up with him. As for Irene, her passivity is just as maddening as Dylan’s aggro.
It’s strange that a nice fellow like Louis is so short of friends he can only assemble three blokes and his girlfriend’s former boyfriend for a party. Furthermore, it’s hard to know what these ill-assorted friends have in common. The personality clashes and sudden turnabouts are too contrived to be psychologically convincing. Finally, like most recent Australian movies, there’s a palpable absence of humour, meaning that the descent into darkness is never modulated. It’s like sinking into quicksand. The final impression one takes away from this visually striking film is of a group of essentially unlikeable characters. Even their depravity feels forced.
Speaking of depravity, Ti West makes a bold attempt at an old-fashioned B-movie, in MaXXXine, the last in a tangled trilogy in which the first installment, Pearl, was released a couple of months after the second, X, in 2022. Two years later, we have the third. Was anybody hanging out for it? Not like they hang out for the next Star Wars or Fast and Furious.
The common element in the three films is aspiring starlet, Mia Goth, who plays aspiring starlet, Maxine Minx. In her relatively brief career, 31-year-old Goth has been in a few interesting movies, playing the gormless Harriet Smith to big-eyes, Anya Taylor-Joy’s Emma, in the 2020 version of the Jane Austen classic; and meeting a sticky end in Luca Gaudagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria.
There’s plenty of stickiness in MaXXXine. It’s 1985, and our heroine who had just started a career as a porn star and escaped a serial killer in X, is now at the top of her profession. She’s determined to no longer waste her talents in X-rated films when she knows she’s got right stuff for a real Hollywood movie. At an audition, director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) seems to agree. Maxine gets the part, but there’s a small problem with yet another serial killer who’s murdering her porn industry girfriends.
The murderer is called the Night Stalker which is a reference to a real Los Angeles serial killer of the the 1980s, that went by that name. He’s dispatching his victims in brutal, sadistic ways, and branding them with satanic symbols. Yes, it’s trash, but self-conscious trash that takes delight in playing with all the familiar tropes of slasher films.
West’s self-consciousness extends to setting a scene in the Bates Motel, which has been preserved and restored at Universal Studios. Hitchcock’s Psycho (1961) may have been the original slasher flick, but it was a relatively bloodless affair alongside its trashy descendants. MaXXXine caters to contemporary taste by providing the requisite buckets of gore and nasty squelching sounds.
Although Maxine knows she is in the murderer’s sights, her immediate problem is to rid herself of the attentions of private detective, John Labat (Kevin Bacon), who is trying to blackmail her into paying a visit to his mysterious employer. This doesn’t seem like a good idea, but naturally Maxine will have to visit the villain’s mansion for the grand finale.
I wish I could say the plot was fiendishly clever, but it would be more accurate to say it’s fiendishly dumb. At least West knows how to keep a story chugging along, adding the occasional murder to hold our attention. There’ll be no Oscar nominations for Mia Goth, but neither is MaXXXine a career killer. It’s sleazy, sensationalist entertainment, made by a cinephile director who seems to nurture secret hopes that we might take him seriously.
Birdeater
Written & directed by Jack Clark & Jim Weir
Written by Rose Gilroy, story by Keenan Flynn & Bill Kirstein,
Starring: Mackenzie Fearnley, Shabana Azeez, Ben Hunter, Jack Bannister, Clementine Anderson, Alfue Gledhill, Harley Wilson, Caroline McQuade
Australia, MA 15+, 113 mins
MaXXXine
Written & directed by Ti West
Starring: Mia Goth, Simon Prast, Elizabeth Debicki, Kevin Bacon, Giancarlo Esposito, Moses Sumney, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Monoghan, Halsey, Chloe Farnworth, Lily Collins
USA/UK/NZ, MA 15+, 103 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 27 June, 2024