Brutal, Disturbing, Vicious & Poignant — “The Gift”

Understated performances never get their due.

The big story of the weekend is that you should avoid the Fantastic Four reboot at all costs, but what should you see instead? Consider psychological thriller The Gift.

Its premise seems familiar on the surface. Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall) move to California, close to where he grew up. An awkward former classmate of Simon’s, named Gordo (Joel Edgerton), thrusts himself into their lives with a cloying and creepy attachment. One thing leads to another, and pretty soon Simon and Robyn are terrified by Gordo. Yet The Gift holds more secrets than your average Cape Fear knockoff. It’s a tightly wound thriller of well-paced deceptions and reveals that holds moments of real fright and disturbing vengeance.

The Gift works so very well because control over its plot evolves from one act to the next. Doing this in a spoiler-free way, during the first act, Simon is making the decisions. He’s the one who guides the direction of the story. The most important element is also the most subtle: Robyn acts out of a need to fill many of the expected roles of a wife to Simon. Yet the viewer can catch blink-and-you’ll-miss-them instances that point toward Simon bullying her. He feeds her those expectations and controls her through them. She’s restless, but she doesn’t know why.

The second act is entirely Robyn’s, and it’s the most compelling. She’s paranoid and trapped in her own home, but it’s not just because of Gordo – it’s also because of the subtle pressures Simon exerts over her life. She confronts her own doubts and begins to uncover hidden truths about Simon as well.

I’ll refrain from divulging anything about the third act except to say it’s all about Gordo realizing his control. This makes for a disturbing ending that doesn’t play to any familiar expectations. The final twist is not one that you’ll guess. That’s a rare feat in cinema.

Jason Bateman plays a subtler form of toxic masculinity.

Its twist is clever because it’s right in front of you the whole time, but it’s also a jolt. Suddenly, the film is making the viewer do the work, hiding answers and forcing the viewer to create their own from whichever truth they decide to put faith in. Since most of the film is about revealing truth and getting closer to being whole, the film gives you an option of what to believe in the end. Is it a story of physical brutality, or psychological manipulation, or of discovering freedom? Only Ex Machina this year has created such a complex and challenging ending, although Ex Machina was much clearer on what homework exactly it wants the audience to take home.

Here’s where the audience will split. For those expecting a more traditional horror movie, a deliberate slow burner might not possess the right kind of big events. There’s creep factor to The Gift, and two of the most effective jump scares I’ve experienced, but this is squarely in psychological thriller territory, not pure horror.

For those wanting a psychological suspense piece with a lot of character, this is your film. It gets inside your head very well, and it keeps you guessing throughout. Its ideas are disturbing and play off the paranoid inferences our own minds start creating everywhere.

All three leads deliver superb performances. Bateman is most famous for Arrested Development, but he shows a skill for subtlety and misdirection here I didn’t expect. He has a scene two-thirds through the film that is perhaps the best moment of his career. Rebecca Hall (The Town) powers through films and has a knack for characters who feel real and accessible. Her role is quieter yet more demanding than the two men. Edgerton (Ramses in Exodus: Gods and Kings) also wrote and directed the film. You can see why he cast himself as Gordo. He’s note perfect, making a small role cast a large and toxic shadow across the rest of the film.

The three fuse and play off each other exceedingly well. Explaining the talent each actor displays on their own doesn’t quite express the devious synergy at play between them. It’s a perfect trio for this kind of film, each one charming, guarded, and needy in turn, one pulling for something the minute another pushes.

One day, The Gift will make a vicious double-feature with Gone Girl. Re-watching the trailer, I’m also impressed that half the things you’re about to see are red herrings:

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section uses the Bechdel Test as a foundation to discuss the representation of women in film. Read why I’m including this section here.

Does The Gift have more than one woman in it?

Yes. Rebecca Hall plays Robyn. Allison Tolman plays Lucy. The awesomely named Busy Philipps plays Duffy. Mirrah Foulkes plays Wendy Dale. Katie Aselton plays Joan. Melinda Allen plays a real estate agent, although she remains unnamed.

Do they talk to each other?

Yes.

About something other than a man?

Yes.

This clearly and easily passes the Bechdel Test. It’s also interesting because so much of what Robyn speaks to her friends about results from the subtle pressures Simon puts on her to fulfill the stereotypical role of a wife. Robyn says she wants to have a family, and she feels it in a removed way, but you never get the idea that she’s made the decision about it. It’s what she wants because Simon puts pressure on her to want it.

The movie’s acts are broken up by scenes of Robyn jogging, yet this seems less for her than it does as a way of releasing something she can’t understand or deal with herself. In fact, the only times she seems to be herself are when she’s around Gordo. She objects to Simon shutting Gordo out of their lives completely, but she allows Simon to bully both her and Gordo into acquiescing to his desires.

It creates a dynamic where Robyn is concerned with stereotypical gender roles not as a self-fulfilling desire, but rather as one that fulfills Simon. Part of the reason why the ending is troublesome on the surface is because Robyn is turned into something to be possessed in the third act. Of course, this isn’t the movie’s commentary on women – it’s a commentary on how Simon views the world and how Gordo can punish Simon. It’s a commentary on men. That doesn’t change the fact that women might suffer in order to make that commentary.

It’s difficult and something of a slippery slope that will inspire a wide range of opinion, but I will say that The Gift finds a way to make many perceived realities into conjectures on the parts of different characters. You really can’t be sure walking out what does or doesn’t happen, or the degree to which someone did or didn’t suffer. In this way, The Gift has its cake and eats it, too.

The implications of all this are right there on-screen, so even if it’s cruel, it’s cruel in order to call out the toxic masculinity that Jason Bateman’s Simon exhibits. Counter-programming Bateman and Edgerton into roles that might make more sense with the casting reversed also serves to exhibit how that toxic masculinity can hide itself in many forms, not just the obvious mustache-twirling, evil villain, film versions. In many ways, The Gift lets you decide just how cruel you want its truth to be, and it forces you into a place where deciding either way is a form of cruelty on the part of the viewer. Do you want to believe in violent, paranoid cruelty or everyday, mundane cruelty?

For that, it relies on Rebecca Hall to thread a needle in a performance that will not be praised as much as Bateman’s and Edgerton’s skilled-yet-showier roles. Hall’s performance offers a third argument: the rejection of both forms of cruelty. In the end, what you walk out of the theater believing may belie your own presumptions and those presumptions that are reinforced by storytelling themes that are repeated in other media ad nauseum. That’s where the genius of The Gift lies, in all senses of the term.

Most will walk out seeing it from Simon’s or Gordo’s perspective, believing in one or the other’s presented truths. To believe in either is to put your faith in victimizers who simply operate on flip-sides of the same coin. Some will walk out recognizing a third route in Robyn’s, a conclusion that must rely on one or the other of the male truths, yet that still exists as its own reality going forward.

The Gift doesn’t say all this or handle it as perfectly as it could – it’s a clear notch below movies like Ex Machina and Gone Girl in how expertly it throws the audience between different perspectives. Yet it does have its own unique way of forcing the audience into a corner, of making us take the homework of thinking and thinking and thinking about it home with us in a way few movies do. That rarity is something special, and it’s unique in many ways to, as David Fincher once put it, “Movies that scar.”

The Gift is very unfair, and that’s the point. It’s left to the audience to decide just how fair its reality is, and how fair everything is after the credits roll, both in the movie’s world and in our own.

Where did we get our awesome images? The featured image is from Entertainment Weekly’s brief review. The 2 in-article images are from Vanity Fair’s interview with Rebecca Hall.

Not Moses’ Best Outing — “Exodus: Gods and Kings”

by Gabriel Valdez

The Biblical tale of Moses leading the Hebrew tribes out of Egypt has been told countless times on film. Charlton Heston most famously parted the Red Sea. Val Kilmer voiced Moses in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt. Ben Kingsley did it for TV. Now, Christian Bale takes on the mantle in the very serious-minded adaptation Exodus: Gods and Kings, directed by Ridley Scott.

Raised with his brother Ramses (Joel Edgerton) as a son of the Pharaoh Seti (John Turturro), Bale’s Moses is a leader and tactician who hides a secret – he was really born among the Hebrew tribes as a slave to the Egyptians he now helps rule. Exodus is the story of his exile and the mission he’s later given by God – to free the Hebrew tribes from Egyptian rule.

Exodus has some glaring flaws. It treats Moses’ story as a series of spectacles, roaring ahead during times of action, yet practically falling asleep in between them. Scott is respectful to the story and its characters while taking liberties with the narrative, but he fails to find any breathing space in between the film’s largest moments. We never get to see our characters, say, look at the stars or sit down to dinner or even take a deep breath before a sentence.

Focusing only on the famous moments, the whole effort begins to feel like the slowest highlight reel ever created. You can feel the film wanting to take some chances and get philosophical, but it just won’t pull the trigger, perhaps because it’s too afraid of upsetting part of its audience. We have a narrative that takes chances with the character Moses, but then shies away and fails to give us any reason for taking them. We have moments of rare cinematic beauty, but the beauty is never used for any storytelling purpose.

The tone is so serious throughout that we’re left with only one emotionally resonant moment, and this belongs to the villain, Ramses. Not all movies need emotion or a greater meaning, but this is the story of Moses and it feels like anything but a spiritual journey. At times, you even begin to wonder if it’s Moses’ highlight reel we’re watching, or Ridley Scott’s.

Exodus can also begin to feel a little like play-acting at times. I won’t delve into the ethics of casting so many Caucasian actors in Egyptian roles. Instead, I’ll just point out that it can make the biggest movie feel quite small: when accents briefly slip, you can quickly find yourself watching Welsh Moses talking to the Pharaoh from Brooklyn while his brother Ramses is trying so hard to not sound Australian that he doesn’t sound like he’s from much of anywhere.

The performances are good, but even the best performers aren’t immune to moments like this. When these actors face off, relatively small inconsistencies build off each other and create much larger problems that can sabotage whole scenes. Exodus isn’t rife with this, but its slow pace and emotional distance create too much room to avoid noticing.

I do need to highlight the 3-D. There are grand vistas, cityscapes, and thousand-foot views of battlefields. The sequence showing Egypt’s plagues is energetic and captivating. That’s expected. What’s not is the unparalleled use of subtle “before the window” effects: floating embers, glittering flecks of sand, flies, sun glare, dust and smoke. The 3-D here is exquisite. It is beyond good. It is sumptuous. This whole review could have been 700 synonyms for how good the 3-D is.

Exodus itself isn’t good or bad. It’s occasionally great and occasionally terrible. This is a middle of the road film filled with absolutely visionary moments and some very good acting sabotaged by a cold, remote, and homogenized approach to storytelling.

Religious audiences will like how respectfully it’s told, even if they will want to discuss the number of details that are changed. Audiences looking for spectacle will definitely find it, but they’ll have to be immensely patient for long stretches in order to earn it. Film buffs will love the technical elements – costuming, cinematography, sumptuous 3D – but won’t have much tolerance for its lackluster storytelling and stop-and-go pace. For every moment of Exodus that stuns, there’s a longer moment that grinds you down as a viewer. It evokes surprisingly little thought and emotion for its subject matter.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does Exodus: Gods and Kings have more than one woman in it?

Yes. Sigourney Weaver plays Moses’ adoptive mother Tuya, while Hiam Abbass plays Bithia. Maria Valverde plays Moses’ wife Zipporah. Indira Varma plays the Pharaoh’s High Priestess.

2. Do they talk to each other?

No. There’s a charged scene involving Tuya and Bithia, but they don’t talk to each other – they talk to the men instead. Even when Moses is saying his goodbyes to family, women may stand next to each other but they only speak to him.

3. About something other than a man?

Well, they don’t talk to each other, so the film doesn’t even get this far. When women speak to men in the film, it’s usually about a man, though they briefly speak of war and plagues.

Final verdict: Ugh. The narrative treatment of women in this film is awful. I could, perhaps, understand women having very little agency in the narrative because the Bible doesn’t give women very much agency in its narratives. That said, film history is full of female characters who still get up to interesting things despite a lack of agency.

In part, this is due to the highlight reel nature of the film. If it doesn’t have to do with Moses or Ramses, it’s not in the film. I understand that approach, but again, Exodus has very little reason for this approach. Look to other epics that didn’t give women much to do – from Lawrence of Arabia to Steven Soderbergh’s pair of Che biopics – at least they had a reason for their restricted narratives. Hell, I don’t believe even Luc Besson’s underrated The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, which almost never leaves its female protagonist’s side, passes the Bechdel Test. But these all used restricted narratives to create a psychological portrait of their characters – at least there’s a reason they do what they do.

Exodus wants to focus on its pair of brothers – that’s fine – but because their story is so grand and epic, and involves women at key points in the film, it seems a complete waste that they have absolutely nothing to do. Women are more often shown standing by, hands folded and saying nothing, than doing anything or speaking a word.

I’ll write more on how ugly a film Exodus is later in the week. I was willing to give Ridley Scott the benefit of the doubt until I’d seen it, but its scripting is sexist, its casting (and arguably its make-up) is racist, and one character is blatantly homophobic.

Trailers of the Week — A Good Week for Cthulhu, Australians, Drug Lords

Look, I’m not saying that Cthulhu, Australians, and drug lords are interconnected. I’m just saying they all enjoyed terrific trailers this week. Coincidence? Decide for yourself. I’m not your mother. (Or am I?)

The great thing about this week is that nearly all the films are ones I hadn’t known of or had only heard about in passing. While it was a tremendous week for the Cthulhustralian conspiracy, I’m going to make it wait a moment.

RHYMES FOR YOUNG GHOULS

This is the trailer of the week. I’ve tried writing on it now a few times, but I take the subject matter too personally. I’ll save the lectures for another day.

Suffice to say that films by, starring, or about Native Americans and First Nations peoples are far too few. It’s a rare thing when the voices of a few artists can contribute to speak not just on an endangered culture, but one we’re responsible for eliminating. It’s special to me because those few voices were once joined by tens of millions, and when stories are told by the few surviving, you can sometimes sense the power of those tens of millions in every word.

SPRING

Wow. In two minutes, Spring does what The Strain has failed to do in a season – send chills up my spine. If you’ve read two words from me, you know I’m a horror movie fan, but if you’ve read more than two words, you know I’m pretty elitist about it. I want my horror smart, psychological, otherworldly or supernatural, based on complex characters. I want to be scared to the point I’m a heartbeat away from laughing. I want to be terrified to the point where I’m begging you for a jump scare, just for the adrenaline release.

Spring looks disturbing in all the best ways, with hints of the quiet build and uncluttered presentation of Scandinavian horror, the color and alluring romanticism of Italian horror, the body horror and catharsis narrative of American horror, and the social malaise metaphors of Lovecraft. If it all comes together, this could be a special horror movie.

MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT

Gareth Edwards helmed the first Monsters, and his use of clever, low-budget trickery and knack for brilliant visuals nabbed him the director’s chair for this year’s Godzilla. What’d I think of Godzilla? It has some of the best trickery and brilliant visuals you’ll see this year, paired with godawful story delivery and acting.

Tom Green (no, not that Tom Green) takes over for the Monsters sequel and what could’ve been a direct-to-DVD mess looks like the Godzilla movie I wish I’d seen, but with 1,000% more Cthulhu goodness. Lines of giant tentacle beasts combing the dusty land, overpowering our modern armies. Tiny Cthulhuraptors engaging in desert jeep chases and being tackled by army dogs.

Yeah, it’s more military hoo-ra-ism, but we really do some nice hoo-ra-ism. [I’ll be honest, Re-reading that last sentence gives me pause after talking about Rhymes for Young Ghouls.] I worry about the acting and the staying power of the visual effects – for modestly budgeted sci-fi films, you usually have to choose one or the other, and it’s possible the trailer contains all the best shots. Still, there’s a visual confidence here, and it looks closer to the Godzilla reboot I wish I’d seen than the one that came out. As a trailer alone, this generates real buzz for a film that has next to none.

FELONY

Ooh, but this looks good. The setup is fairly basic – a hero cop (Joel Edgerton) has a few beers and accidentally hits a teenager on his way home. A veteran detective (Tom Wilkinson) takes it upon himself to clean up the incident and make sure the right questions aren’t asked. A crusader (Jai Courtney) decides it doesn’t all add up, and pursues his own investigation.

That’s a million straight-to-DVD plots right there, but the difference is this pedigree – Wilkinson’s ability to play real-world fearsome is rare, while Courtney and Edgerton are two of Australia’s best up-and-coming actors. Edgerton has shown a chameleon quality you wouldn’t expect by looking at him, and he also had a hand in writing one of my films of the year thus far, The Rover.

It doesn’t hurt that Felony has already came out in Australia to rave reviews.

GOD HELP THE GIRL

Emily Browning, 25, will probably be playing teenagers until she’s 35. She just has that look. This is a problem, since the Australian actress has been on the verge of breaking through as a mature, complex performer for years now. At some point, something like her Sleeping Beauty, brutally experimental and tonally haunting, is going to break through into the mainstream and serve notice that she’s a powerhouse talent.

Until that point, if she’s going to play a high schooler, let’s hope it’s at least in indie films like God Help the Girl. Director Stuart Murdoch, of chamber pop band Belle & Sebastian, seems to have found a colorful, energetic visual style that reflects the baroque, yesteryear tone of his music. I’m not expecting this to blow the doors off the theater, but if it can convey the bouncy yet melancholic tone unique to Murdoch’s band and achieve the same lullaby quality through its visuals and Browning’s performance, we’re in for something charming and – dare I hope – reassuring. And reassuring isn’t often a priority in movies at the moment.

KILL THE MESSENGER

I’m glad Jeremy Renner’s getting back to some character acting. He’s the kind of actor who you have play Carmine Polito in American Hustle, or San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb here, not on whose shoulders you rest an entire franchise (hi, Bourne, Mission: Impossible, potential Hawkeye movie).

Who was Webb? He was a reporter who revealed that the Reagan Administration had shielded drug dealers on U.S. soil from prosecution, as a way of funding their suppliers, the Contras, in their CIA-backed coup of Nicaragua. And 20-odd years later, we wonder why the children of Central America are showing up on our doorstep, and act like they aren’t our direct responsibility for what we did to their countries in the name of the Cold War.

Though he was torn apart by mainstream media in the 1990s for his claims, much of Webb’s research was later vindicated. He died in 2004, having committed what was ruled a suicide. By shooting himself. In the back of the head. Execution style. Twice.

I fully expect, and hope, for Renner to nail this to the wall.

Paradise Lost is the other drug lord movie, starring Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) and Benicio Del Toro (Che) as Pablo Escobar. In truth, it looks pretty iffy, and I’d much rather leave you wanting to go learn more about Gary Webb.

Half-Year Awards — Best Screenplays, Director, and Film

You know the preamble. Let’s just dive right in:

Best Adapted Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky & Ari Handel, Noah

A lot of people hate the story in Noah. It’s too bastardized, they say. Damn straight, I say. The story of Noah doesn’t belong to the Bible. It was around long before, transmuted into a plethora of different stories across different cultures that highlight contrasting details. Noah never adopts an orphan in the Bible. This is a reference to Korean flood mythology. There are no giants in the Bible’s Noah. This is a Midrashic conceit that belongs to certain sects of Judaism. Noah doesn’t contemplate exterminating his grandchildren in the Bible. This sequence combines reflections of other Biblical books – the jettisoned baby in Exodus, the crisis of faith in Job, and most importantly the tale of Abraham in Genesis.

There are countless other details from a variety of other religions folded into Aronofsky’s retelling of Noah. It creates a Frankenstein’s monster of a myth, housing itself inside Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic religions alike and vibrantly socially aware of the moment in time it arrives in our world.

Feel free to hate it for not being accurate to your interpretation of Noah, but Noah was never yours to begin with. Neither is it Aronofsky’s or Handel’s, and their patchwork retelling reminds us that it’s not so much the detail in the story that’s important – those details are completely different for everybody – but it’s the common meaning those various interpretations seek to teach us that is crucial.

The narrative details aren’t sacred. They’re just as bastardized in the Bible as they are out of it. The meanings are sacred. The world’s done a horrible job of getting this through its head. We argue about the length of Noah’s ark and its width and what wood it was made from and how he fed the animals while we ignore that in all those stories, God sends down the flood because we were annihilating each other and so lost in petty bickering we ignored the needs of the helpless among us. Understand that before you come at Noah complaining it’s not accurate enough.

Devoutness of detail can often be a useless habit. Give me a new interpretation that reminds me of the old meaning any day of the week.

Best Original Screenplay: Joel Edgerton & David Michod, The Rover

We so rarely get short stories on film anymore. Our movies today sprawl, like labyrinths meant to make the biggest and most widely talked-about mark on our social calendars. Every character gets his or her own realization mid-plot, so we can check the character development box off the list and justify a dozen different character-specific posters. Even in our blockbusters, two sides aren’t enough anymore. I like my seven-sided, choatic end-battles, believe me, but there are only so many writers and filmmakers who can truly hack that.

What about the short story? What about visiting a time and place for just a moment, getting just a glimpse? What about leaving us wanting to know more? Many of our works of art have forgotten how to shield their characters from us. Characters are thrown at us with gadgets and costume changes and sidekicks for spinoffs. That’s fine…so long as we don’t forget those other movies, the ones that contain characters we should never want to see again, or that we should wish to save, or that we should pity, or that we should hate. Sometimes all at once. The Rover visits a time and place we should never want to see and delivers characters we should never want to meet. It stays long enough so that we begin to care what happens anyway, that we begin to understand why someone might be a way we never could be ourselves, and then it exits gracefully.

Like The Proposition a decade before, which also starred Guy Pearce, it crafts a haunting story from an elegant blend of poetic dialogue, stark visual, and simple structure. In a short story, every word matters. So, too, in The Rover. Every word, every shot, every cut matters, and builds to a whole at just the right moment – the second before the credits roll. It forces you to take a piece of that time and place you’d never visit back with you into the real world, to contrast the two, to be terrified at their similarities and joyous at their differences. It’s a staggering work that demands tears and silence and reverence. The Rover is a fire-and-brimstone sermon in the church of film.

Best Director: Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin

My choice for this at the end of last year was Alfonso Cuaron for his pioneering work in Gravity. At least until I saw Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster. But that’s another essay. This year, it’s the polar opposite of those two directors. Instead of Cuaron’s painstaking cinematic techniques, so groundbreaking they demanded new inventions, and instead of Wong Kar-Wai’s precise, artistic framing (nearly every shot is so painterly it’s worthy of its own essay), Glazer is much more hands-off. He gathered a wild array of fringe talent and let them go wild.

In various Guardian articles, and in my own interview with author Michel Faber, who wrote the novel on which the film Under the Skin is based, Glazer’s loose, guerrilla approach to filmmaking began to take shape: Conversations with passersby recorded on hidden camera. Covert microphones hidden in umbrellas picking up stray conversation on the streets of Edinburgh. An FX studio let loose to envision an alien’s digestive tract in visual metaphor. Documentarian shots of both nature and civilization. An experimental rock musician asked to score it all.

What Glazer does is invite chaos into his movie, trusting himself enough to shape it. The result is a mash of experimental techniques fused into a powerful whole. These diverse technical experiments shine through so much that you can even see how contributors’ interpretations agree and disagree. It’s rare that so loose and experimental an approach results in a film so tight and complete. The most difficult part of directing is knowing when to control chaos and knowing when to unleash it. For mastering the balance, at least for this film, Glazer does something just as impressive as inventing new technologies or framing everything with painterly perfection.

Best Film: Under the Skin

Any other year, this wouldn’t be a contest. It would be The Rover with nothing else close. But Under the Skin is the best film we’ve had in many years, the most challenging, the one that does something film is very often incapable of doing. Many films put you in someone else’s shoes. Almost none trick you into filling out the shoes of a sociopath and rapist. The film has such command of allegory, it truly makes you stop and contemplate a perspective that’s (hopefully) completely alien to you, and it transports you very uncomfortably outside of your own realm of sensation and experience.

Also take a look at our Half-Year Technical Awards and our Half-Year Acting Awards.

The Good, The Bad, and The Australian — “The Rover”

It felt like the summer needed to take a breather. Between the superhero movies and animated sequels and giant monsters, we needed a week off from visual effects, especially with the looming cloud that is a fourth Transformers movie on the horizon. This made it a very strange summer weekend at the movies. Nothing major opened – only a by-the-book comedy sequel and a classy but cliché-ridden band backstory.

It’s a perfect opportunity to highlight a smaller film, in this case a post-apocalyptic vengeance tale out of Australia called The Rover. It stars Guy Pearce, a veteran of these kinds of bloody art films, and Robert Pattinson, of Twilight infamy.

Its story is simple. A global collapse 10 years ago has left Australia a third-world country. Three bandits argue about leaving one’s younger brother behind, and crash their truck. They take a car belonging to Eric (Pearce), who finds that younger brother, Rey (Pattinson), and uses him to track down the car.

Why is Eric so intent on getting his car back? He’s left with the bandits’ better, faster truck. It’s at the core of the story, but for a long time, it becomes secondary to Eric and Rey’s journey. In an American film, the two would be good guys. They’d start at each others’ throats but through witty banter and close calls they’d grudgingly learn to work together. Not so in The Rover.

Eric makes it clear early: the two are not friends. The more we learn about Eric, the more we realize he’s got very little soul left. He’s vicious and remorseless, and would sooner kill than be cornered into a conversation. Rey is slow, perhaps even mentally handicapped. In him, we see an impressionable boy who lacks the tools for this world. Rey’s growing loyalty to Eric breeds in the boy a growing need to commit violence. Drawing a parallel between Rey and the Elliot Rodgers and Dylan Klebolds of the world isn’t difficult – these aren’t murderers created by music or movies, they’re murderers created through misguided loyalty to someone who teaches them hate.

Australian movies have a habit for removing the usual gloss of Hollywood filmmaking. There’s far less violence in The Rover than in a single action scene of any of this summer’s blockbusters, but when it does happen, that violence is raw, quick, and brutal. Characters don’t get slow-motion death scenes with an orchestral crescendo; they get left in the dust with the buzzards. There’s eloquence in its hideousness, though. When there’s no room for escapism, the viewer is confronted by what a film has to say, and The Rover traps you in a corner.

Director David Michod and cinematographer Natasha Braier create a bleak and broken landscape – even the sky is sand colored. Yet the film always stays visually arresting. Scenes start at odd angles to where they’ll take the story; they don’t telegraph moments beforehand.

Pearce’s performance is stunning. At one point, he thinks it’s all over for himself, that he’s going to jail for the rest of his life. He speaks with the knowledge that this is long overdue. It’s almost a relief to be caught. It’s a chilling moment, watching something so dead and soulless speak. Yet there are other times when the shreds of Eric’s remaining humanity peek through, brief moments when his eyes come to life just as quickly gone.

None of this should overshadow Pattinson. I’ve never held the Twilight franchise against any of its actors. (If you paid me a hundred million dollars to stare off-camera and look pained, I’d be there early every day.) But Pattinson is a revelation in The Rover, the best performance of the year so far. Rey is a character who could easily go off-the-rails into lampooning territory, but he never does. You can see him processing the world around himself, violence becoming easier, changing from a danger to a solution.

And then there’s the ending – unexpected, taut, graceful, tender. It changes everything that’s come before. “The Rover” asks challenging questions without offering answers. It’s a cynical reflection of all the hope we have in our cinema today. That hope – costumed heroes saving the world – is important to cling to. It’s crucial, but so are films like The Rover. They’re a worst case scenario – what if that hope doesn’t work out? A necessary question, though not one many viewers may wish to face.

The Rover is rated R for language and violence.