Mystery Road

Australian films make me patriotic. Check that, good Australian films make me patriotic. Nothing gives me greater pride in my nation than one of our own showing the world that we're more than Fat Pizza, Young Einstein and The Wiggles Movie. They're few and far between though, unfortunately. With most Australian productions going through the government-run Screen Australia, it's hard to get any serious financial backing for production, let alone distribution or promotion. This has a habit of sorting the wheat from the chaff, however. When you're operating on a shoestring budget, everything falls down to the limited resources at your disposal. Some films become Animal Kingdom, some become You Can't Stop the Murders. Mystery Road is thankfully one of the former. With next to no money, it's a naturally-lit, bare bones, gorgeously filmed piece of art that takes a very slow walk through rural Queensland, turning over every dark rock to expose even darker secrets before it shrugs its shoulders and continues on.

A fusion of neo-noir and westerns, Mystery Road opens with a trucker discovering the body of a young Aboriginal girl, throat slashed open and body positioned delicately underneath a highway bridge. Returning to his home town from a 10 year job in the city, Aaron Pedersen's Aboriginal cop Jay is the only officer tasked with investigating her murder. He's met with resistance wherever he goes: some of the fellow officers see him as nothing more than a racial token, and treat his police work like he's a child playing pretend. The local white community is often the same, openly treating him with racial insensitivity, and though the Aboriginal community does see him as the same degree of police officer as his white colleagues ("You a copper, brah? We shoot coppers, brah."), they in turn see him as a traitor, a man who is happy to lock up his brothers. As he slowly, ever so slowly, continues down the rabbit hole, he uncovers a network of lies, betrayals, drugs and murder that's hiding in plain sight on all sides; a community that simultaneously reviles and requires its corruption.

Mystery Road ends with an unbelievable shootout. Almost every shady character, cop or criminal, that Jay has encountered is involved, and with no clearly defined alleigances or rivalries, everyone starts shooting at everyone. It's brutally realistic; snipers carefully line up their shot and then wait breathlessly as their bullet travels the distance to see if they need to try again. The bullet hits a car hood or rock beside their target, causing their target to flinch and curse, and then it's their target's turn. People on the ground fire blindly from cover in the general direction of their target, while others stand fully exposed firing until their clip empties, causing them to scurry desperately to cover. By the end of it, everyone is dead but Jay. He walks over to the car, reminded of couch cover fibers buried deep underneath the first victim's fingernails, and discovers claw marks in one of the vehicle's back seats. She was definitely in this car, so it's a logical conclusion that these men were her killers. But why? Why was she murdered in the first place? And why was almost every key player in the community involved in this deal? Not to mention what was the deal in the first place? And why did Hugo Weaving's dirty cop Johnno spend the whole film vaguely threatening Jay's life only to save it in the end by firing at his fellow police officer? Mystery Road answers none of these questions, nor the others that I've neglected to mention.

Parodoxically though, the film simultaneously presents no answers while confirming the conclusions the audience is invited to draw within the first thirty minutes. Initially, this left me feeling hugely frustrated. I was right in my assumptions, and yet I received no closure on them. The film merely said, "Yes, you were right." And then I realised that was the point. If someone seems shady, they probably are. If a neighbourhood looks like it has racial relation problems, it probably does. This is a community small enough that instead of a street and house number, directions are, "It's on your old street. The green roof across from the red roof." Everything's so lethargic, because it's all so obvious. Johnno asks if Jay's ever killed someone and not told anyone because he knew he could get away with it. It's a thinly-veiled, very real threat made against Jay's daughter's life, and he keeps going at his steady investigative pace, because he knew it was coming, and he knows where it will be coming from. And so the 'what' is answered, but not the 'why'. The film's themes of racism aren't even really drawing any conclusions, which once again, is the point. It's not excusing the existence of racism, it's just saying that it exists. More than that, it's not always clear the motivations are racially driven. It's certainly easy to assume Jay's being treated as inferior by his fellow officers because of his race, and in some cases it's certainly true, but is it true in all cases? He left this town for 10 years and though the sergeant says that it's good for him to be back, it's clear he's not being honest. Why did he leave in the first place? He spends the entire movie on the brink of emotional explosion, be it rage, despair or any emotion other than stone-faced inquisitiveness. Once again, there are no answers. Corrupt government-run establishments exist. Racism exists. Just plain bad people exist.

Throughout Mystery Road, the community is being terrorised by wild dogs. They're never seen, beyond a quick glance at one of them, but they're heard often, either literally or through the citizens that have come in contact with them. One of them had been biting the murder victim's arm and the coroner's report returns unidentifiable saliva. "It's almost like she was bitten by some sort of...super-dog," Jay is told. Initially, I thought they were perhaps just another unanswered question, but then I began to see them as representative of the town's corrupt citizens and their nature; that they seem to be able to run wild, attacking and eating whatever they want, with no-one willing to stop them. They just sit around complaining about it. It's a sentiment that also ties into the racial issues raised in the film. No-one in the town denies that there's disparity between the white and Aboriginal communities, but no-one is willing to do anything about it. Even Jay is guilty of this; he thinks that by trying to make an honest go of his life that it somehow solves the societal problems of his community, when in reality it just makes him selfish and naive. Which is not to say he shouldn't have pursued a career, but that he shouldn't then assume that this simple personal achievement is going to break down barriers for his entire race. A problem can't be solved with bare minimum effort and bitching. Mystery Road knows this. It also knows that the preferable action to sitting around complaining is to get objective; to stand back and view the picture as a whole. What it doesn't know is the answer. Because it's just not that simple. Racism seems like a problem, because it is. Time for me to shrug my shoulders and continue on.