Shameless Self Expression

Set in the title town in New South Wales, buddies on a fishing trip (Irish-born mechanic Gabriel Byrne, Stelios Yuakmis, Simon Stone, and veteran character actor John Howard) discover a floating dead body, but after tying the murder victim to a tree, continue with their leisurely activity for the time being. We know creepy Chris Haywood is the killer from the get-go, and he’s further filmed in an over-the-top manner, and Haywood acts accordingly. When they get back to town (they report the body to police just before leaving), the media and many of the townsfolk condemn the men, sickened by their callous inaction. The situation worsens when it is revealed that the victim was an Aboriginal woman, and that one of the fishermen’s partner (Leah Purcell) is herself an Aboriginal. Laura Linney (in full-on histrionic, brittle mode) plays Byrne’s unstable American wife (it’s believed she may have suffered post-partum depression in the past), who hates his hardened mother, and after the fish...

Maggie Q is a doctor specialising in sleep issues, who is still haunted by past trauma in her own sleep, revisiting the night her brother died whilst sleepwalking. She’s currently helping out a troubled family who seem plagued by some kind of sinister force in their dreams. William Hope plays a professional colleague of Q’s, whilst Sylvester McCoy plays an important part in the plot as a deeply disturbed old man with his own sleep issues. If this 2018 horror pic from writer-director Jonathan Hopkins (a former production assistant making his feature-length directing debut) could’ve stayed on the level of creepiness and quality in its opening scene, we’d have a winner here. Even the credits are genuinely creepy, with unsettling illustrations of demonic figures playing over them. Yikes. Unfortunately, the film never really reaches that level again, aside from a pretty neat little twist in the end. The main problem here is that every time Hopkins tries to drum up some atmos...