Snowtown [Blu-ray]

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Product Description

All Regions release, playable on all world-wide blu-ray players.

Sixteen-year-old Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) longs for an escape from the violence that surrounds him in Adelaide's northern suburbs. His salvation arrives in the form of John (Daniel Henshall), a charismatic man who unexpectedly comes to his aid. However, as events occur around him, including the disappearance of several people, Jamie begins to harbour deep suspicions about John and his motivations. When the truth is finally revealed, Jamie s hopes of happiness are threatened by both his loyalty for, and fear of, his father figure - John Bunting, Australia's most notorious serial killer.

Snowtown [Blu-ray] Review

This is not a horror movie. It's far more frightening, if considerably less entertaining. It's not a suspense thriller; its agonizing tension comes from the dread of witnessing the inevitable.

I don't know whether to envy or pity the reviewers who found this "boring," "slow" and "dull." Since "Silence of the Lambs," we've become slowly inured to the titillating entertainment value of the serial killer. (The current nadir is the incredibly bland, implausible and desensitized TV show "Criminal Minds.")

"Snowtown," by contrast, feels horribly real. Killings happen not in stylized torture chambers but in the same dreary, downtrodden homes the rest of the movie takes place in. Nearly unbroken, subtly handheld camera shots take us from social backyard bonfire to bagged and barrelled corpses, from front porch on a balmy day to kill zone, with a documentarian's unblinking eye... as if murder is one more mundane thread in the fabric of everyday life. For John Bunting, it probably was.

The scariest thing about Daniel Henshall's Bunting is his chipper, everyman banality. Bunting was no loner. He recruited at least 3 others to help carry out his killings. The complaints about numerous peripheral characters drifting in and out of the narrative unannounced are valid, but these interactions show us Bunting's disarming camaraderie, moving him out of a loner's hovel and squarely onto the throne at Jonestown or overseeing Manson's commune. The consensus Bunting cheerfully bullies out of neighborly, impromptu kitchen-table tribunals (we've all been at one) becomes, in his mind, the razor-thin justification needed to act on his obsessions... and to groom accomplices.

Jamie is also a unique character in films (and real-life cases) such as this. The movie successfully forces us into a struggle of conscience over Jamie. We condemn his choices throughout, and we valiantly resist the special pleading of the Rousseauist, 'product of his environment' case for social determinism that "Snowtown" could be construed as arguing. Only long after the film was over did I find myself conceding that Jamie is a special case. He's not a serial killer himself, for whom nature vs. nurture wouldn't matter... psychopaths will be psychopaths. There IS something about his personality, about his victimhood, which multiple abusers sense opportunity in and exploit. And we can't help but notice it too... alongside Bunting, creepily enough.

The film chooses to exclude the cruellest and most horrific details of the real-life killings, which I only learned about after googling it online later. I for one am very grateful NOT to have endured their portrayal in this film. The details we do get are excruciating enough. Their necessary dilution (if not, who could bear to watch?) is not just an act of mercy, but part of the film's strategy: all sensationalism has been methodically drained from this account, leaving us no other option but to bear witness to the awful potentiality of human impulse. I appreciate why, but this approach bound me in a moral dilemma for days after seeing "Snowtown:" SHOULD the film, by soft-pedaling the truth, allow us to care more about Jamie?

I never once felt sorry for Jamie Vlassakis. You could argue the film never asks us to. But "Snowtown" never holds Jamie accountable for his weakness of character, either. It starkly observes, but never evaluates, his pitiable lack of resistance. At a key turning point, Jamie is asked: "Do you like to get [raped]?" For a split second we're not sure the incident in question was rape or not, so passive was Jamie's endurance of the assault. The question itself feels like an assignation from a new abuser, and it is... in far worse ways than Jamie can fathom at the time. Bunting is the vampire invited across the threshold. I found Jamie's complicity just as disturbing and haunting as Bunting's sociopathy... and somehow, against all my instincts, I can't quite call that complicity indefensible.

Is it the film's achievement or its failure that I can't put into words what Jamie is or does? To me, his choices ultimately don't wash. Never mind that they actually happened (although many aspects of the true-life case remain sealed, and for all we know Vlassakis is a psychopath himself). They weren't just atrocious choices, they were hideous actions. They ended innocent people's lives in horrible ways, people that Jamie knew, sometimes at Jamie's own hand. The plot may want us to buy into a classic tragic arc... to believe Jamie is struggling inside more than his behavior belies, right up until a point in the film when a perfect opportunity for escape, rescue and salvation is decided against and squandered. But contrary to the script's possible intentions, we begin protesting Jamie's decisions before he is even a witness, let alone an accessory. And our questions keep piling up.

Why, Jamie? The answers aren't to be found either in the unfilmable truth or the euphemized "Snowtown"... and perhaps there are none. Consequently, I thought at first that perhaps it would have been best if this story was left unfilmed (or at least unwatched!). In the end, what redeemed "Snowtown" for me (if not its characters) is how it re-injects serial murder with all the senseless ugliness it deserves. It's a sobering antidote to absurd modern antiheroes like Hannibal Lecter, whom yuppie audiences (financially insulated from real-life violence) relish as the ultimate arbiter of manners; or Dexter, the equally ridiculous "serial killer with a conscience."

John Bunting doesn't have a conscience. That's why he's a serial killer. For all his public rants of righteousness, he never killed for justice. Bunting is (like most of his kind) a sadist who tortured for pleasure and preyed on the weak. His "moral code" is a pathetic attempt to justify his compulsions in his own mind. John Bunting killed more innocent people than anyone else in Australian history. "Snowtown's" Bunting leaves many of his wounded victims alive... Jamie; Jamie's family; and now us, the audience.

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