Wolf Creek

Copyright ©2005, Arclight Pictures/Dimension Films/The Weinstein Company.

It’s noted at the beginning of this film that 30,000 people are reported missing in Australia every year, and that ninety percent are found within a month. This film could have been about what happens to the other ten percent, but it doesn’t explore that in any more than a superficial manner.

Ben Mitchell (Nathan Phillips), Kristi Earl (Kestie Morassi) and Liz Hunter (Cassandra McGrath) are preparing to make a trip up to Wolf Creek, a strange meteor crater site. Ben and Liz seem to be interested in one another, and flirt here and there along the way. Ben tries, as many movie males do, to impress the ladies with some singing and mediocre guitar playing—”tries” being the operative word. They stop at a couple of places along the way, Halls Creek and Emu Creek.

At Emu Creek, they run into a few nasty drunks who accost Liz. The group wisely walks away from the situation, leaving in our minds the possibility that something about these men may come back to haunt them… or not. As they arrive at Wolf Creek, their hopes to have a good walk through the area are hampered by rainfall. Kristi notes at one point, “I wonder why the meteor hit here, in this place, and not somewhere else?” Ben replies, “Maybe it was drawn to something in the earth, like when lightning strikes.”

This raises such an interesting possiblity regarding the crater, which is later supported by an oddity—their watches all stop working. Also, the car won’t start. The three end up spending the night at Wolf Creek. A man stops by the roadside. He offers to tow their car and fix it up. After much discussion about this suspicious figure, the three friends decide to trust him.

The guy tows the car back to what appears to be some sort of mining camp. Where? We don’t know… neither do Ben, Kristi and Liz. Up until this point my mind was swimming in the possibilities. You see, I hadn’t read or seen any of the marketing prior to the film. So, for all I knew it could turn out to be about aliens or some mystical force that trapped them in a pocket of time… so that when they’d return from Wolf Creek, everyone would be thirty years older—or something to that effect.

No such luck. The next morning, Liz wakes up tied in a shed. Her friends are missing, but she can hear screams in the distance… likely to be Kristi’s. “Ok,” I thought, “Let’s see where this is going.” Initially, Liz manages an escape. Another possibility arises. Maybe this is going to be a movie that shows the strength of the female protagonist, despite the failure of the male protagonist. Some would argue that’s a cliché, but it’s only a cliché if the male shows up at the last minute to play Deus ex Machina, rather than having the movie’s focus yield on the female lead—self-sufficient and calm, collected and resourceful in bizarre circumstances.

Wrong again. At every possible turn from here, the film becomes exclusively about glorifying violence. What does it say about Greg McLean, the director, that his most disturbing and graphic violence is reserved for Liz, a female who is also the more attractive of the two women held captive? Ben’s fate is hardly even glossed over. Here there is shot after agonizingly sophomoric film-school shot of one or the other girl screaming, face bloodied.

Even fetishists who delight in acts of mutilation have at least somewhere in their mind a juxtaposed love of both pleasure and pain. This film focuses all its energy in scenes of hatred and pain. Even the banal film, “The Cell” spent more time establishing the killer’s source of his hatred and pain. “The Cell” was painfully boring, and it made similar mistakes about picking the less interesting possibilities to follow (dwelling more upon the little boy’s nightmares/fears would have been far more creepy). Here, there are no such insights.

Imagine House of 1000 Corpses, but more disturbing… now imagine it without the sideshow characters. Now imagine it without any humor.

“Wolf Creek” is not so much explicitly gory as it is implicitly so… We don’t see bones exposed, or flesh being grotesquely cut. I can handle the visually-gory, but if it exists simply to exalt itself, then there’s not much point to it. Even if the argument is that McLean is being “artistic,” he’s not being innovative or provocative because we’ve seen it before. Calling it “art” would be falsely imbuing the images themselves with an intellectual quality of their own. The casual observer will probably write back to me, “But you wrote many thoughts.” This is true, but note that I had to reference other films and other manifestations of pain/pleasure, horror, gore, etc. just to have something to write about.

What made me nearly walk out of the press screening was the fact that the gore, the misogynistic sadism and self-important violence, lack any kind of objective. There are horror films that are scary, unsettling, even hilariously bad… but here we are treated to one scene after another of sickening themes we could just as easily have read about in the news. Must a director keep violence just this side of implausible so we don’t lose our lunch? No, not necessarily. I think a horror film can evoke sickness on the part of the antagonist to lead us to some conclusions about the them… maybe even conclusions we don’t like.

However, if one’s goal is to make a film that achieves some sort of distribution, and begin the film with several possibilities that all have meaning, then the audience can either be treated to an exploration of that meaning or at least teased with the possibility while ending on a contrarian note. That, however, requires speaking in a tone where audiences can be intrigued at a distance by at least some sense of a story unfolding (Seven comes to mind), rather than having their faces rubbed in self-indulgent excrement only to be left with no story. Here, McLean seems to be indulging in a very personal fantasy. That’s all fine and well (I’m not making a moral assessment here, just stating that he’s free to do what he wants on celluloid), but such personal fantasies (also called “snuff films”) serve the creator rather than an external audience. Why seek distribution, then, if your whole purpose in making such a film as this is to excite yourself?

Maybe McLean knows that there are a handful of other individuals out there who are excited and titillated by one-dimensional depictions of violence lacking in subtext… and maybe he’s also counting on morbid curiosity. But, as a famous singer once said of show business, “An image and a good hook can get you in the door, but something has to keep you in the room.”

This film is not at all fascinating in any genuine sort of way… It’s base titillation on nearly the level of a nine-year old who still delights in burning grasshoppers under a magnifying lens “just to see what happens.”

On the other hand… to say this film explores pain in as methodical and empirical a manner is an insult to the scientific curiosity of nine-year olds.

Wolf Creek • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Running Time: 99 minutes •MPAA Rating: R for strong gruesome violence, and for language. • Distributed by Dimension Films/The Weinstein Company