A murdered girl is found under a bridge on a remote road and indigenous detective Jay Swan gets the case. Jay finds that no-one is that interested in solving the murder of an indigenous teenager and he is forced to work alone.
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Reviews
Very best movie i ever watch
A brilliant film that helped define a genre
While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
Mystery Road'' is a western-like crime film, written and directed by the talented Ivan Sven. The movie is set in a small Australian town where everybody knows everybody and a gruesome killing of a black teenage girl takes place. The protagonist (Aaron Pedersen) is a young tough-but-fair police officer, divorced and the father of a young girl, who strives to solve the case having often to overcome the nonchalance of his colleagues and superior and the hostile behavior from witnesses and suspects. The plot moves slowly forward, enhancing the feeling of suspense and the breathtaking cinematography is bound to dazzle any viewer. ''Mystery Road'' is a very entertaining police procedural with top-level acting both by Pedersen and Hugo Weaving (in a supporting role) and a memorable, very well crafted, final shoot-out scene. If you are looking for the generic Hollywood crime film you will be disappointed as ''Mystery Road'' will attract the audiences who appreciate different qualities in a movie.
Why was I immediately sold on this movie? Within minutes I was hooked, and stayed with it 100% right through. That, in my case, is an immediate plus point for any movie.So how did it get me? I guess because it struck me as believable - the characters, the places, the story. Having visited the edge of the Auz outback I fully related to the backgrounds and the characters. The texture and feel of the presentation struck me as the genuine article. I have said it before about top quality film directing - that the feel was more like a documentary with real people and not actors.The acting was excellent but not of a fine silken quality or in any way slick. Rather the characters were raw and gritty, which could explain some review comments suggesting wooden or poor acting.This movie felt like a fly on the wall view of the hard side of a tough life in the Australian outback, replete with huge social problems, racism, and defeated and depressed people tying to survive while drugs and crime were eating into the life of the area.As depressing as was the setting, funny enough, I was not in the least depressed by the movie. There was a strong ethical line and I felt throughout that good would make it in the end.This is a great movie without any big name actors, without fancy settings, without a great musical score, without great special effects, without bells or whistles of any description. It is totally minimalist art. It's greatness is in the excellent direction, the acting, the cinematography, and a decent enough plot.
There is a class of film lovers who want to concede and live the eras of film making. Even though they were born in situations separated by time and space, they feel nostalgic about the early and subsequent industrial era diffusion (and its effects) brought in thru history, literature and cinema: The periods when homesteaders entered Dodge City, when London started getting crawled in by villagers or when families from a big city relocated to newly planned adjoining suburbs. If you identify with this description, you've probably got a treasure here.19th century Wild West lives in 21st century Bush! Not that it's uncreative; the history of filmography is etched in this 2 hours intelligent crime story. Referencing the classic westerns to earliest neo-noirs to recent crime features, the unknown director theoretically beautifies the Film making.The score is as quiet as the life itself while as intriguing as its characters. Unbelievably well photographed! Aerial shots and silhouette wides suit the mood of terror in an uncivil, dusty town with principal actors having a gem to showcase their worth. Screen writing concerned me a bit but that doesn't stop me from saying that if given a worldwide interest, I'm sure Australia will unbland the perceptions of Australianness and allow us into new realms of cinematic and cultural entertainment.
Mystery Road (2013) is a film about a small town cop whose investigation into the death of a young prostitute leads him into a dark underworld of meth producers and pimps. While director Ivan Sen tries to effect a dark and somber mood, it's kind of hard to take the whole thing seriously when some of its locales have names like "Slaughter Hill" and "Massacre Creek". Even the naming of the titular road seems to serve no purpose other than to remind us of the genre of film we're watching. Which is to say nothing of the film's weird affinity for aerial tracking shots of "Detective Jay Swan" driving from one dilapidated country shack to another. Mystery Road scores some points for its visual association of a rustic countryside setting with bleakness and decay (see also, True Detective and Breaking Bad), but everything from Aaron Pederson's flat performance to the overlong running time make this a B-list thriller at best. If the film has a saving grace, it's the deftly choreographed shootout scene at the end.