Limbo

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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“Limbo,” by Australian director Ivan Sen (“Mystery Road”), is the quintessential example of Existentialism on screen. Piercingly shot in crisp black-and-white, the film is strongly unapologetic in its detached, opaque, and stark quality. Although the film is suited for those with an exclusive taste, the effect of “Limbo” is lulling and hypnotic with its own unique poetry. One might not be drawn to it easily, but it has its own rhythm with great meaning in its laconic passages.

Detective Travis (Simon Baker, “The Mentalist”) travels to The Outback to find answers to a 20-year-old cold missing person case. Circumstances are complicated further given that Travis is a heroin addict. He is permanently wrinkled and sweating, always seeming on the edge of unbearable vexation or a nervous breakdown. Travis’s car does not work. He is forced to trade with a local curmudgeon, Joseph (Nicholas Hope). The people do not want to talk to Travis in any manner, let alone about the disappearance of Charlotte, a young girl, twenty years ago.

Travis takes refuge in a sort of coral tunnel that resembles a wormhole. Day after day, he is bombarded by religious sermons on the radio, and all the while the residents are taciturn to him, if not outright rude. Question follows question without any answers whatsoever.

Even Charlotte’s brother Charlie (Rob Collins) refuses to speak to him. After shooting up, Travis visits a melancholic decayed chapel where all is dingy and somber without solace.

This film is minimalist in the extreme and though the landscape is empty and desolate, the sparse inhabitants seem like bereft astronauts on a lone moon. The film is set in the desert of Coober Pedy, mainly to achieve the effect of a white landscape.

Simon Baker utters precious little dialogue, but he has never been better. Granite-faced and tormented, Baker illustrates something of “Breaking Bad” and Walter White. Travis seems invariably on edge, yet he is also strangely dispassionate.

Though the story is fictional, the specifics of the plot echo the Bowraville Murders, which took place in mid-North coast of New South Wales during the early 1990s. There have been many crimes against the indigenous people of Australia.

The suspense has a feeling of a Western while the cinematography by the director himself harkens back to John Francis Seitz of “Double Indemnity.”

If there ever could be a version of “The Unforgiven” or “3:10 to Yuma” rendered by Albert Camus, this film would be the model with all emotional tones muted and forlorn.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com