Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Joseph Sims-Dennett
Starring: Meg Clarke, Leighton Cardno, Gautier Pavlovic Hobba, Tony Hughes, Diane Smith
Aussie New Wave movies of the '70s like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Long Weekend set the template for Australia's own brand of folk-horror. In Aussie folk-horror the land is often portrayed as a place where humans (or at least white humans) have no business venturing, ready to drive them insane with all manner of cosmic trickery. Writer/director Joseph Sims-Dennett's The Banished falls very much into this category, an Aussie folk-horror twist on Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', with the Congo River here replaced by a sprawling forest that draws the protagonist towards a disturbing revelation.
Grace (Meg Clarke) left her small town for the city when she graduated school and hasn't looked back since. She's now forced to return following the passing of her father, with whom she seems to have had a strained relationship. Attempts to contact her estranged brother David (Gautier de Fontaine) prove futile, until Grace learns he may be living with a hippie commune deep in the nearby woods. Grace hires one of her old teachers, whom she still insists on addressing as "Mister Green" (Leighton Cardno), to lead her to the commune.
The Banished opens in media res with Grace waking in the woods and discovering Mr Green has seemingly abandoned her (a shame, as Grace and Mr Green's awkward interplay is one of the film's highlights). Flashbacks fill in the events that lead up to that point, with the main narrative following Grace as she treks on alone. In a trope we've seen before in forest-set horror movies, Grace finds herself ending up back where she started, as though the forest won't allow her to stray from its own defined path. Grace thinks she has a lifeline when a voice appears on her radio, a man named Michael who claims he is similarly lost. Maybe Grace and Michael can work together to get out of this mess?
Although it's perhaps overly reliant on rehashing the clichés of this type of horror movie, Sims-Dennett's film effectively builds tension and suspense from its ambiguity. For much of the film both Grace and the audience are literally and figuratively in the dark, with the night scenes particularly creepy. All it takes to spook us is for a character in a horror movie to shine their torch through some trees at night, as our minds struggle to determine if we're seeing eerie figures in the dark or simply deceptive shadow play. Rightly or wrongly, we assume Michael isn't going to prove the saviour Grace requires, so the closer she appears to get to him the more unnerved we become.
The Banished's effectively atmospheric journey is derailed however once it reaches its destination. There's an act of violence that is shocking and grisly in a way only Aussie horror movies seem capable of now, but it's followed by a climax that veers, like so many cosmic horrors do, into a nonsensical mess of flashing images, this sub-genre's equivalent of the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But that journey will likely be enough to mildly satisfy horror fans, and Clarke gives a striking performance as a woman who begins the movie as a confident city slicker, only to regress to a scared little girl left all alone in the woods.
The Banished is on UK/ROI VOD from July 28th.
