Such a frustrating disappointment

Simply Perfect

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a classic of Australian film-making.Take a superb cast.Mix in a wonderful screenplay drawn from a very intense book.Then add a genius in the soundtrack/background sounds dept. and you have a film rich in suspense, paced as only a cast of this calibre can.Don't expect car chases (although you get some rough and tumble stuff in cars).Just expect a rare beauty that captures the starkness and loneliness of the Australian bush...and teaches us all something about the tyranny of distance!

Its as if the script writer attempted to portray how inner demons can cause an outer hysteria. These glum characters all suffer from apparent psychological torments from their past and present which they choose not to acknowledge. This repression causes a manifestation of their inner fears into a supposed creature that is killing their livestock. Its a mask for their inner fears and its easier to look outer rather than inner. With this film, far too much time has been spent on creating a "haunting atmosphere"...this time could have been spent on script revision and character building. Miranda Otto is capable of so much more and is quite a talented actress....however in this particular performance we only see an anxious character with violent dialog and no direction as to where, why or how ??.....The token old man narrative voice overs are seemingly placed randomly and fall flat every time. There can be no comparison to "Picnic at Hanging Rock"with this film. Not even Brenda Blethyn could come to the rescue. Overall a big disappointment, very boring and an attempt to build something up to a pointless nothing (it didn't even have any metaphorical value).

I thought this was a great film. If your looking for car chases, shoot outs, cops and robbers then you won't like it but I think there are enough of those out there.The movie is set around the killing of local livestock by a mysterious 'black' creature. What makes the movie a little unusual but well worth watching is that the characters are used as the backdrop to the livestock deaths and not the other way round. Over the course of the movie we learn some of the peoples past while they are trying to find what is killing their animals. In a nutshell the the events in the movie are quite metaphorical.Watch and you will enjoy it. Don't expect a blockbuster but still a good movie.

Ray Barrett is quite perfect: always a competent actor he rises to sublime heights here with his portrayal of a tortured soul caught in all the ghosts of his past. Brenda Blethyn was perhaps a surprise choice for the wife but handled the part very well. Richard Roxburgh gets better with every sighting and his versatility is astonishing. Otto was better than in the similarly dark "The Well" which I thought failed as a movie.