![]() ![]() ![]() The family's two tormentors, who emerge from the brush as the family is relaxing after a picnic, demographically echo the family: there's a charismatic, chattering white sadist named Mandrake ( Daniel Gillies), after the magician and a stone-cold-silent Indigenous man known as Tubs (Mathias Luafutu). His wife Jill ( Miriama McDowell) appears to be Indigenous, and their tousle-haired teenaged sons, Maika and Jordan (Billy and Frankie Partene), are handsome, talkative, and obviously very close to each other and their mother (though one has unarticulated issues with his dad). The father, Hoaggie ( Erik Thomson), is a white man of Dutch descent who has worked as a teacher and a professor for a long time. Something horrible is going to happen, probably more than once, and you're gonna have to wait for it. It's a stunning opening shot, and there are plenty more moments like it: beautiful, ominous, unsettling, using the landscape in a way that's simultaneously menacing/desolate and possessed of otherworldly beauty. Ashcroft-who co-wrote the script with Eli Kent, from a short story by Owen Marshall-has that David Cronenberg gift for icy precision and tonal control, where the filmmaking fills the viewer with dread before the credits have even finished. ![]() The story starts with a slow tracking shot across a desolate highway, revealing a car abandoned by the side of the road, personal effects scattered about, driver's side door cracked open. ![]()
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