Being that Hugo Weaving is one of the most under-appreciated actors of his generation, I had high hopes for Strangerland. It’s been a while since Weaving last played in a hit film, and with Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes rounding out the cast, this project seemed promising. But alas, Kim Farrant’s directorial debut, set in the Australian outback, is mostly a dreary bore, heavy on atmosphere but lacking in the kind of psychological insight toward which it gestures. A mystery pitched at times like a horror film, it’s hardly more than a collection of familiar tropes and dead-end subplots, all of it so grimly overwrought that the effect is numbing.
Yet Weaving is seemingly unable to give a bad performance, even when his character is as thinly drawn as he is here. He plays David Rae, the detective in charge of finding two missing children—their parents, Catherine (Kidman) and Matthew Parker (Fiennes) recently moved the family to Nathgari, the film’s dusty desert locale, for reasons that are vague at first, but eventually clarified. Their sexually precocious teenage daughter Lily (Maddison Brown) spends the first 15 minutes of the film flirting with every male she encounters, her younger brother Tommy (Nicholas Hamilton) in tow most of the time. Early scenes at the house are tense, as the Parker parents sleep in separate bedrooms and try not to look ashamed of their daughter.
When the children disappear and Detective Rae searches for their names in a database, he discovers the reason for the Parkers’ relocation: their daughter had a relationship with one of her male teachers, whom her father violently beat up when he found out. The plot, as it unfurls from here, attempts to tackle some heavy subject matter, from victim-blaming to Rae’s ethical compromise involving Burtie (Meyne Wyatt), the Parkers’ mentally challenged handyman—but the screenplay by Fiona Seres never gets beyond the surface of these themes. Because Burtie is the brother of Rae’s girlfriend, he takes measures to hide the fact that he slept with the Parkers’ daughter. But we never really see him wrestle with himself over this decision, though he appears to be an honorable man in every other facet of his life. As for Matthew Parker—who doesn’t seem to like his family much anyway—his reaction to everything is simply to get really, really angry, a character trait apparent immediately from his perpetual glowering scowl.
But Catherine’s reaction to her daughter’s disappearance is especially befuddling. While her husband despises Lily for bringing shame to the family name, Catherine seems to envy her, her own alluded-to wild past long behind her. In the film’s worst scene, she drunkenly attempts to come on to Burtie while he passively resists. The horror-movie music underscoring much of the film reinforces how twisted the filmmakers think it all is, but it’s never once believable enough to be taken seriously. Nor do the filmmakers seem to have any idea what they’re trying to say. The film moves so aimlessly, with significant plot developments few and far between, until it ends with a shrug. Keep it moving, folks, nothing to see here.