Wolf Creek is a film of the horror/slasher variety, a genre for which we have no affection or respect. That said, the film takes full visual advantage of the physical beauty of its setting in the Australian outback. The writer/director, Greg McLean, is trained as a painter, and it shows. He is very good at the creation of tension and dread, too.
And he has written dialogue that is not completely stupid.
Those are the positive aspects.
Wolf Creek is sort-of based on several actual crime events in Australia, including the Hume Highway backpack murders and the more recent Falconio case. (The film could not be released in the Northern Territory until after the recent trial of Peter Falconio’s murderer, Bradley John Murdoch, on the grounds it could affect Murdoch’s chances of getting a fair trial. Murdoch was convicted.)
In Wolf Creek, three backpackers — two British women and an Australian man — meet and decide to travel together to see the extraordinary meteor crater at Wolf Creek, which is handily located smack dab in the middle of nowhere in the Aussie outback.
It takes almost an hour to get these kids on the slab: There are brief flirtations to document, landscape and sunsets, twinkly stars, raindrops, UFO stories, campfires, spooky atmosphere bits and a menacing run-in with some toothless locals. So far, so good.
Everything creepy is a product of the imagination.
Once we all get to Wolf Creek, however, the plot thickens, and mostly through the simple addition of blood. The car dies, a friendly local (John Jarratt) shows up to help and our three backpackers (Nathan Phillips, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi) wind up in a pickle — we’re talking chains, knives, guns, nails, missing bady parts and like that. Gross.
About “18A” worth of gross. You may need to squirm and recoil a fair bit to get through the film, which involves graphic, sickening violence. The camera never looks away.
The director has said that he had a countercultural intention of sorts with this movie, and that intention was (more or less) to show that good doesn’t always triumph over evil. That is an important lesson generally learned in the process of growing up; one can only wonder if such understanding is fostered via the sight of dog-eaten dead bodies.
Sorry — half-bodies.
BOTTOM LINE
It’s possible to appreciate Greg McLean’s filmmaking talent and still hate the depiction of human cruelty, violence and madness to be found herein. Er, isn’t it?
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