Strangerland (2015)

Beautiful landscape and a chance to make a complex and intriguing movie. Instead, the movie was a confusing, pretentious exercise in overacting. The movie never gives a clue what is the point and why should be we believe anyone or anything.Nicole Kidman plays a mother whose daughter has become wild and uncontrollable. Instead of behaving like a mature adult, she is promiscuous and walks through the town naked. Even nowadays, that will get you banned from a small town forever. Why was she bruised? The movie never explains. What happened to the daughter? No one knows. Maybe she got away from her family and became a successful millionaire. An Adult beats up the neighbor's kid, but the police chief does not arrest him. On what Planet would that happen? Is the police chief covering up his own role. He shreds the evidence that might indict the neighbor's kid. When does this take place? If it is 2015, once again, I am sure Australia has the equivalent of Amber Alerts. You bet that some local sheriff would not be running things. There would be Media and every agency in the Australian Government would be in town. I guess movies is the one place that reality can be suspended for the plot. What plot?! This movie was a mess. Was Nicole Kidman trying to win an Oscar? She certainly was overacting.

A modern-day version of Picnic at Hanging Rock which was a classic. This wasn't. Not even close. Kidman does her best to save the day as the mother whose children go missing. Fiennes (the husband) has his moments as does Weaving (the police officer) but the plot is as uninspiring as the outback town in which this is set.

One has to stick with this film. The tension builds layer by layer till one is holding one's whole body tight. Why? There's no big bang or surprise but one just get's caught up with the reality and the hurt of it: and one hopes. The acting is superb from all the performers and Nicole and Joseph come through with perfect pitch. Truly talented professionals.

A friend of mine had a sister go missing in the 1980's, in central British Columbia, Canada. I remember being quite young, but it made the local news, and we put posters up on telephone poles. She returned a few days later, after staying with an older boyfriend, and she claimed she was upset at her parents so she ran away. I remember it really taking a toll on my friend's family, and it tore them apart. I can only look back on it through my childhood memories, but as an adult I began to understand their frustration with her and the danger that she posed to herself.Strangerland introduces us to one such family, living somewhere in the Australian Outback. Joseph Fiennes and Nicole Kidman join together in this film about an extremely fractured family struggling through one of the most traumatic events a family can go through. The movie has a somewhat slow pace, and lacks a sense of dramatic urgency one would expect in a situation like this, however it does an excellent job of showing how this family goes through different stages of grief. I found most of the drama perhaps too focused on their dysfunctional little family and characters were a bit to one dimensional at times. There are of course some relatively boring moments in this film, but I certainly liked the story. The one thing that was really out of place here was a strange sexual undertone from Nicole Kidman's character, which in my opinion was rather detracting from the overall plot. Nymphomania didn't really seem like an idea that would cause all of this to happen.Perhaps the director was too focused on this sexual theme, that at times it really took away from the terror a situation like this instills on a family. I think any family who has to go through this situation must have different horror stories that they must go through themselves. It's a sad and sickening thing to have to ever happen, and the grief must be unbearable at times, and as time goes on, many families never truly get the closure they need as the days become months and months become years. A similar theme to the movie Prisoners (2013), but a much slower and perhaps boring story for some, yet it does make you think about how families must cope in situations when a child goes missing.5/10