Cast: John Jarratt, Cassandra Magrath, Kestie Morassi, Nathan Phillips

A terrifying story of a relentless serial killer and his hapless tourist victims, Wolf Creek is loosely based on truth. The cases of convicted backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, and the more recent British tourist Joanne Lees, whose ill-fated companion Peter Falconio disappeared, presumed murdered, in the Australian outback are still very much in our consciousness. The film opens with captioned statistics: 30,000 people go missing in Australia every year. Most are found within a month. Some are never heard of again.

It’s 1999 and British tourists Liz Hunter (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy Earl (Kestie Morassi) set out in high spirits to the bouncy driving tune of ‘Eagle Rock’ from the long beaches of Broome, Western Australia. They’re with an Aussie, Ben Mitchell (Nathan Phillips) in a cheap, old car bought for the trip, and heading for Darwin, via Wolf Creek, site of one of the largest meteorite craters in the world.

At a fuel stop their carefree camaraderie is spiked by the coarse, red-neck behaviour of some locals in a bar, giving the first indication of a wild and unpredictable violence in this environment. Uneasily it appears that out here the civilised rules these travellers have lived by do not apply. They press on to Wolf Creek. There’s still a feeling of their being tourists as they go down into the huge crater and experience its eerie, stark beauty. When first their watches stop and then the car battery fails, a feeling of uncertainty grows. Perhaps the mineral deposits from the meteorite have affected the batteries, or perhaps something more sinister is at work, but this road trip is turning into an ill-fated foray into wilderness where they are stranded when night falls.

Tension builds as car lights (possibly) are seen coming towards them, then relief when seeming Good Samaritan, Mick Taylor (John Jarratt), comes to their aid. Still rattled and uncertain, they decide to trust him when he says he’ll give them a tow to his place not far away, so he can fix their car. Some of these people will not survive the ordeal that follows.

Much of the tone of unease in this part of the film comes from that uncertainty all travellers have about local custom. They’re worried about how much it’ll cost to get a new coil, but Mick says derisively, “It’s not Pitt St, mate! There’ll be no charge!” Seemingly hours later Mick has brought them through the pitch blackness to what looks like, and is, an abandoned mine. Dozens of them exist, says Mick, matter-of-factly, and people have forgotten many of them were ever there. Ben asks Mick what he does and when Mick replies, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you!” they do their best to be at ease, joining Mick’s raucous laughter with their own uncertain smiles. There’s a portentous lack of humour in Mick when Ben makes an ill-advised joking reference to Crocodile Dundee’s “You call that a knife? THIS is a knife!”

There is a shift in the film with what happens soon after this and it increases in intensity, sudden shocks and appalling violence of a most creative kind on the part of anti-hero Mick. The curious phrase ‘head on a stick’ will achieve ghastly, unexpected meaning, and there might be fresh reasons for not stopping to give an exhausted, bloodspattered and hysterical girl a lift on a lonely outback road. John Jarratt gives us an odious psychopath, totally justified in his own mind in what he is doing and enjoying himself hugely, and this gives him an almost epic power which is sure to be well explored in the promised sequel.

The parts of the three young tourists are played with sweetness and fun. Only one of them demonstrates resourcefulness even halfway fierce enough to match Mick.

There are some small flaws in this excellent film and one big one. Among the quibbles is the full moon which is sometimes evident and sometimes not, giving an unexplained total blackness (though spookily atmospheric), when the three helpless tourists are waiting at the crater or being towed to their doom. Stock footage added during editing like this, as is the image of the solar eclipse the following day during an iconic scene with one of the victims, is fine if planned and supported by continuity in the rest of the film, and not contradicted by shots of a moon half full at other times. Similarly the ‘sunrise’ over the beach at the beginning of the movie is impossible in Western Australia, and these simply add annoying, jarring elements.

Unfortunately these lapses in continuity and congruence make obvious some lost opportunities for increasing the unsettling atmosphere. Discordant moon phases could have been used to indicate dislocation in time or loss of time, with the victims lapsing in and out of consciousness over a few days, with a few surreal nightmarish scenes added as well.  

Even in daylight the heat-hazed and blasted, eerie atmosphere of the crater could have been used more deliberately to create more of a palpable fear effect on the city-bred tourists. A full moon rising over the crater at Wolf Creek, supposedly around two million years old and with an enormous diameter of 853 metres, could have been utilised for even more subtly spooky effects, and so an important opportunity was lost here in favour of the complete unknown of total darkness. Darkness has tension inducing power too, of course, but the fact that the full moon symbolises madness as well as being an astral body similar to the meteorite which made the crater so long ago, and the fact that the deceptive light of the moon can make one see things, aided by a fearful imagination, that are not there – was another lost opportunity. A solar eclipse has even more unused potential for symbolism and is too obviously an add-on in post from stock footage.

The main flaw is that there is no hero. There is no-one aware enough or strong enough to match Mick Taylor’s evil doing. The one survivor is lucky, not smart, and whatever that survivor might have learned by the ordeal or the mind-numbing legal aftermath is not given. Instead, the film ends with a true crime feel and no real resolution. It feels like another missed opportunity.

That being said, the character of Mick Taylor and the movie as a whole make a huge and horrifying impact regardless, especially on an Australian consciousness already sensitised to the reality of actual cases. As it stands Wolf Creek is a brilliant platform for a sequel, where hopefully there will be a hero who will be large enough, or grow to be large enough, to bring the vile Mick to his nemesis.

© Avril Carruthers       5^th November 2005