LOCUSTS

Stars: Ben Geurens, Jessica McNamee, Nathaniel Dean, Peter Phelps, Andy McPhee, Steve Le Marquand, Alan Dukes, Ryan Morgan, Malcolm Kennard, Justin Rosniak, Kenneth Moraleda and Damian Hill.
Writer: Angus Watts
Director: Heath Davis

WORLD PREMIERE: Gold Coast Film Festival, April 11, 2019 at Home of the Arts (HOTA), Gold Coast, Queensland.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

After two critically acclaimed films that explored flawed blue-collar humans from deeply humanistic perspectives, director Heath Davis takes the gritty, grimy genre route in his latest, the outback-noir crime melodrama, Locusts.

Rife with a rogue’s gallery of red dirt, small-town scumbags for whom murderous villainy is second nature, Davis (working with past collaborator and debutant scribe Angus Watts) proves perfectly proficient at hitting all the narrative beats needed to give his modern-day Western a slow-burn pulse.

More importantly, Davis knows the psychology of desperate men; his debut feature Broke (2016) and sophomore effort Book Week (2018) soared on Davis’ empathetic handling of protagonists burdened by memory and history – two thematic elements that boost the more lurid moments of his first thriller.

Ben Geurens (pictured, top) stars as Ryan Black, a Sydney-based tech entrepreneur who is drawn back to the life he left behind in an outback town (the harsh beauty of Broken Hill and its surrounds playing the unnamed outpost) when his father passes away. The population is littered with dark-hearted types, notably the thuggish trio of Cain (Steve Le Marquand), Benny (a fearsome Justin Rosniak) and Davo (the late Damien Hill). Perhaps worst of the town’s lowlifes is Ryan’s wayward brother, Tyson (Nathaniel Dean).

The Black brothers soon find themselves bearing the burden of their father’s sins. With Tyson at the mercy of vengeful crime-boss McCrea (a wheelchair-bound Alan Dukes) and his henchmen, Ryan enlists the help of tough single-mum Izzy (Jessica McNamee) to conjure the hefty ransom that will secure his brother’s release; McNamee (pictured, above) is the latest of Davis’ strong, smart central female figures, previously played by Claire van der Boom, Susan Prior and Airlie Dodds. From that point, there is no shortage of desperate double-crossers, sibling rivalries and loaded gunmen to convolute the proceedings.

Geuren’s Ryan is an archetypal genre figure; the man fleeing a past that refuses to let him go. It is a role that has featured in stylish modern-noir cult items like The Coen Brother’s Blood Simple (1984), John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) and Oliver Stone’s U-Turn (1997). Locusts will come to represent for Heath Davis what those films mean to the oeuvre of their directors; maybe not their finest work, but evidence of a natural flair for storytelling and respect for and knowledge of the conventions of great genre cinema.