Every critic has his or her biases. For example, I’m disinclined to like
any film in which a character’s priorities are deemed out of whack because
their cell phone goes off at inopportune moments. (Unless the phone goes off
in movie theater. Then they suck.) It’s a cheap form of shorthand and
increasingly irrelevant; everyone has cell phones for personal and/or business
use these days and the little fuckers are going to go off once in awhile in
a bad spot. Doesn’t make anyone evil. (Latest culprit: Sarah Jessica-Parker
in The Family Stone.)
On the other hand, I’m virtually guaranteed to like two particular types
of films: (1) Stories of unrequited passion in which the love between two people
is stifled by the tacit disapproval of society-at-large. (Favorites: The
Age Of Innocence, In The Mood For Love, Far From Heaven/All
That Heaven Allows/Ali: Fear Eats The Soul.) (2) Horror films
that put an emphasis on realistic, visceral terror. (Favorites: The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, Last House On The Left, Henry: Portrait
Of A Serial Killer, The Devil’s Rejects.) This Christmas
has brought us a gem from each category: Brokeback Mountain and the
Australian thriller Wolf Creek, which counts as one hell of a nasty
piece of counter-programming. With few exceptions, critics have rallied around
the former, which seems to me a certain (and deserving) Best Picture winner.
But Wolf Creek is being treated, save for a handful of advocates (namely,
Slant critics Ed Gonzalez and Nick Schager, who put it on their Top 10 lists),
like the proverbial lump of coal in our Christmas stockings—crude, tasteless,
gratuitously vicious, even immoral.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Even a genre standard like The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, widely regarded as a masterpiece today, was just
as widely derided when it was first released. To some, this kind of horror realism
offers little but unredeemed sadism: The victims are in real danger and real
pain and there’s no safety net for the audience, no assurance that lives
will be spared and order restored. For detractors, the big question is always
“why.” Why the torture? Why the sadism? Why does a film exist for
no reason other than to rub our faces in extreme violence? I like to answer
those questions with one of my own: Why does the violence in Hollywood action
films and other entertainments go uncommented upon while films like Wolf
Creek are singled out for derision? One swipe of the giant ape’s
hand in King Kong results in several times more casualties than those
in Wolf Creek; all that the latter does is make each of them count.
It’s punished for reminding us of just how horrific violence can be.
All that said, clearly Wolf Creek may be too intense for some viewers
and I certainly don’t begrudge anyone for skipping out on an undeniably
unpleasant moviegoing experience. For the rest of us, Greg McLean’s skillfully
crude debut, about a trio of amiable young thrill-seekers who get snared in
the Outback, has much to recommend: A first half that quietly gains menace as
it aligns our sympathy with these characters, a tense second act in which the
three heroes accept a tow from a jovial country bumpkin who’s slow to
reveal his intentions (ending in perhaps the year’s most heart-sinking
cut), and the raw desperation and anguish that sets realistic horror films apart
from their genre peers. If you have the stomach for it—and keep in mind,
that’s an awfully big “if”—this is nauseatingly essential
viewing.