Review: SWEET RIVER

A woman returns to goes to a cane farming town for answers about the murder and resting place of her son. She is befriended by the neighbours and starts asking around about what happened to her son who is considered a victim of a homicidal predator long gone presumed dead (or shown to be dead). There is also the story of a school bus crash. So while all this is happening there are shady things in everyone's past that our heroine Hanna finds out, often by accident rather than investigation. And weaving their way through this near static tale are the ghosts, or something, of a host of children who are a mix of bus crash and murder victims who appear in the cane fields or clodhop on the corrugated iron roofs of the auld Queenslander houses. This all kind of coalesces and then the credits roll, leaving me frowning at the waste of opportunity.

Before that, though, I should note that every frame of this film is not only National Geographic worthy beautiful but keeps promising to tell a compelling story only to be let down by a typically Australian undercooked screenplay. It's not just the look. All the performances are good and feature fine moments of screen acting, either pushing character envelopes with a gesture or expression or holding right back and letting the context do the talking. The score is a magnificent synthesised tide of mood enhancement and mystery building. This really should have been a winner.

Ok, so how come Hanna's son Tommy died here when the place seems so new to her? Wasn't she there at the time? If she was why doesn't anyone know who she is? If there was an explanation for that I missed it. In this script where important things are said or done because they probably should go in that bit it gets pretty easy to miss things. Also, for all the emotion aired on screen there seems such an energy vaccum behind the camera as scenes succeed others with such little substance. It feels like they were reading off a draft put together as a scrapbook and just went along with it.

What does work is the world building. This community is walled in by its own guilt and the physical barriers of the towering cane. The cane is where the figures of the dead appear most and the rapidly changing visibility of the setting renders scenes with them shiveringly creepy. One moment involving this is so gently unsettling I wondered if I'd really seen it at all. At it strong moments this film really does deliver eerieness. There is a sound, a shriek that lies somewhere between a human scream and an alarm that appears in the distance throughout and when you know (or, more accurately, suspect you know) what it is it, too, sends chills. It's just a pity about the undercooked mystery plot that wraps around it which goes from a good slowburn start to a dish that never quite feels ready.

Here's why I care about this and won't simply let this go as a nice try. I'm from North Queensland. My paternal grandparents were cane farmers. There were cane farmers on my mother's side, too, and we holidayed at their place once when I was about eight. I remember the wonder of the cane burning at night and the newness of staying in a different place (Bundaberg). Anyway, there was a milk bar a short walk away that sold these peanut shaped caramels coated in chocolate (like Fantales, apart from the shape). These might have been made locally as I've never seen them anywhere else and you got them in a paper bag. They were enticement enough for me to brave walking through what felt like two kilometres of jagged edge road through three metre high canefields either side, whispering and hissing away, hiding untold numbers of snakes, monsters or killers. I just kept thinking of the caramels and I wouldn't touch them until I got back to the house. That memory has long made me wish for a horror story to be set in canefields. Now there finally is one it ends up being this film with a baffling choice title, a film whose success is completely undermined by the indecision of its storytelling and a director who can get an incredible looking scene that leaks interest the longer we sit through it. So, I'm still waiting.

Sweet River is on Netflix.