The viewer is a fly on the wall for this stark and eerie story of Australia’s worst real life serial killer, John Bunting, as seen by his young protege, Jamie Vlassakis. From 1992 to 1999, Bunting snuffed out eleven people whom he mostly suspected of pedophilia or homosexuality. The film doesn’t dwell on the violence, aside from one cruel killing that we only see at its beginning and end stages and it’s mild compared to the average “torture porn” flick. This is a reluctant horror movie. It’s a chilly character study that’d be more comfortable in the arthouse than the grindhouse. It’s about how Bunting becomes a role model to a fatherless, empty-eyed teenager who’s too young and needy to know a creep when he sees one. Bunting earns Vlassakis’s respect when he stands up to his mother’s pedophile boyfriend (note for the squeamish: this scene involves the tossing of actual dead kangaroo parts) and then keeps the kid hooked with paternal initiations into manhood that grow more and more sadistic.
It ain’t pleasant, but it is beautifully made with lots of wide open Australian sky and vivid scenes of rundown suburban sadness. Its cast of largely unprofessional actors are scarred, imperfect people who bring home the realism. They look like the faces you might see if you went out and walked around your block one afternoon. As in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, there are no good guys here. No police, no investigators, no avengers, no victims who fight back. Director Justin Kurzel (making his feature debut) turns a fine-tuned microscope on these aberrations and lets them dart around freely in a world where nobody wins.