The action begins in Los Angeles, where actor Lou Wells (Rebecca Breeds) is fast approaching rock-bottom. After a promising start in Hollywood with a role on a soap, she’s now broke and living on her ex-boyfriend’s couch, and her agent has dropped her.
At the climax of a day that couldn’t get much worse, Lou talks her way out of a traffic fine using the plane ticket she received from her estranged father. With nothing more than the clothes on her back, she finds herself on Kangaroo Island, the astonishing beauty of her childhood home in stark contrast with the state of her relationships with her father Rory (Erik Thomson) and sister Freya (Adelaide Clemens).
The family reunion gets off to a rocky start, with the reasons behind the family rupture unfolding in a series of flashbacks. Before leaving for Hollywood, Lou had fallen in love with local surfer and budding astronomer Ben (Joel Jackson). Ten years later, Ben is now married to Freya, their children’s ages revealing a relatively short gap between Ben’s relationships with the two sisters.
A prodigal daughter returns, a smouldering love triangle rekindles – these tropes alone would be drama enough to fuel a feature film, but as it turns out Lou’s career as a soap star provides handy experience for the narrative twists about to unfold.
Rory has an ulterior motive for bringing his daughters together, but even this revelation becomes just one more blow in a dramatic prize fight. As the narrative escalates, secret upon secret is brought to light, all underscored with the bubbling tension surrounding inheritance of the family property.
There are many things to appreciate about this film, with the acting and location being the obvious standouts. Breeds, Clemens, Thomson and Jackson all deliver world-class performances, with Breeds in particular illuminating every scene in which she appears.
With careers straddling New York and Australia, the husband-and-wife team of screen producer and director Timothy David and writer Sally Gifford wanted to create an Australian film that could stand shoulder to shoulder with its international counterparts. Their goal was to make an Australian film that avoided leaning into its “Australianness” by relying on ocker cliches. With the exception of a fleeting “strewth” and a snake in a car, David and Gifford have achieved what they set out to do by using universal themes of grief and the power of family to both harm and heal. These grand themes played out on Kangaroo Island’s rugged locations beautifully connect this isolated place to the rest of the world.
In fact, Gifford’s writing cleverly uses the local fauna as a leitmotif, the gorgeous shots of wildlife interspersed between scenes serving to reinforce one of the main themes of the narrative – that humans are animals, just one species among all the wildlife existing on the island, no more important or valuable than any other.
In the same way that the narrative packs in drama after drama, the themes underpinning the story are densely layered. The existence of God, the limits of science, the ethics of euthanasia, the possibility of an afterlife and the transformative power of nature – all these are constantly in play throughout the film.
It is testament to the writing and direction that this reliance on the touchstone of local wildlife feels natural. A heavier hand might have tipped all that glorious footage into a feature-length advertisement for Kangaroo Island, but David and Gifford have instead created a film that reinforces the idea that places like this are essential for humanity to recalibrate its sense of superiority and instead feel humbled by the immense power and wonder of the natural world.
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With its world-class performances and breathtaking locations, Kangaroo Island was the perfect choice for the closing-night gala of the Adelaide Film Festival. While local audiences will be thrilled to spot well-known haunts such as Snellings Beach, Stokes Bay, the Vivonne Bay General Store and even the airports in Adelaide and Kingscote, it is even more exciting to think about how the local places and wild species we treasure will be viewed by the rest of the world, showcased as they are in this stunning piece of cinema.
Kangaroo Island will have an encore screening on November 6 at Palace Nova Eastend. Other AFF films with encore screenings include Songs Inside, Lesbian Space Princess, My Favourite Cake, Maria and I Saw the TV Glow. Details here.
Read more Film Festival reviews and stories here.
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