The Dead Speak Back
Festivals
What do we expect from cinema? A plot would be good, as would a few characters. Perhaps the characters should interact, so that we can hear them speak, get to know them, get to understand the plot through them.
This is all well and fine if we like our cinema as pure escapism, as entertainment, but what of cinema as art?
Without the help of any conventional plot, characters or dialogue, The Dead Speak Back is a bold and challenging film by local Adelaide writer/director Jason Sweeney. It does not so much tell the story of grief as it does explore it, in a most brutal and personal form.
In Adelaide, boys go missing. Sometimes they are sexually abused. Sometimes they are found with their heads severed. One woman – fiercely played by Caroline Daish – is visited by a recently murdered boy and forced to reconnect with her own personal grief, having lost her own son through murder.
The grief is bodily: she jerks, twists and howls, and confuses crying for laughter. It is also private. Most of the film is a series of solo performances without words, without “extras” or minor characters. In fact, the only time when two or more characters interact is in a dream, a visitation or a hallucination (and still, there is no dialogue) – or in the very strange David Lynch-esque bar scene in which the three other patrons are presumably caught up in their own lonely grief. The patrons work as imagistic tropes, and their stories are as internalised as that of Daish’s character. The scene is uncompromising.
Clearly, The Dead Speak Back is art, not entertainment. And it’s not escapism, because Sweeney and Daish are so invested in the art that it bleeds through the screen and relentlessly begs us to absorb the grief. By all accounts, it’s confronting.
The film was originally intended as a short – and Sweeney is no amateur there, with his 2006 film Disappointment winning the Best Experimental SA Short Screen Award – and in all honesty it feels like it should have remained a short film. But that is perhaps why it pushes the boundaries of film-making.
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We expect avant-gardism in the short film genre and we expect a more grounded realism in the feature film. Thank goodness events such as the Adelaide Film Festival provide an outlet for these experiments which make us question art and the places in life that are truly unspeakable.
What Sweeney has accomplished – with the richness of the lighting and set design, the stunning cinematography and, of course, the intuitiveness for projecting emotion – makes me wonder what he might do with a more conventional film. I’m keeping my eye on him.
The Dead Speak Back had its world premiere screening at Palace Nova Eastend as part of the Adelaide Film Festival.
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