Roadkill (2022) has the good sense to let its outback shooting location figure highly throughout its running time, almost making the hostile environment one of its one of its core characters. In fact, it makes more sense as a character than some of the actual characters on offer. The film overstretches itself in its plot direction and its character development, and both suffer as a result. We open with a young man in the Outback, Connor (writer and director Alexander Whitrow), reclining on his beat-up old red sports car, on the phone to his girlfriend. He’s promising her that before long they’re ‘outta here’, which never bodes well in a ‘last day as a detective’ kind of way. After the call, we see him flagging down a passing car; ah, so he’s stuck out here? Nope – it’s a trick, and he’s about to rob this family – though why he gets the robbed couple’s baby out of the car, to hand it to them, to drive off and leave them and the car intact is a mystery. Still we’re given enough to deduce that Connor is a career thief, but not a monster.
There are monsters out there, however. We cut to a pair of detectives, thankfully neither of whom is planning a retirement that day, discussing a totally different crime scene. A young woman has been murdered, and there are indications that there’s a serial killer on the loose. As the detectives second-guess where their killer may go next, our roadside robber and his wholly unsuspecting girlfriend Lucy are reunited, discussing in more detail about how they are planning on escaping this neck of the woods. Things falter a little here – there’s a family visit and a meal to get through, and you know how those are – but wouldn’t you know, Lucy’s uncle is one of the hard-bitten detectives from the serial killer case. And there is a suggestion that the robber and the serial killer’s worlds are about to collide too – first with a visual clue, and then with a sudden escalation of events where mistaken identity, the redoubled efforts of the police and Connor’s determination to get away, the film nails its colours to the mast as a revenge-pursuit film.
That last few sentences condenses down the key set-up here, but be warned: it isn’t quite that pithy in the film itself. Roadkill‘s biggest error is in trying to do too much – the cardinal sin of so many first-time feature directors – but in so doing, it actually feels strangely diffuse, rather than overloaded. It pauses to offer us character development, and it rushes a small crowd of characters onto our screen in places, but in some respects this only underlines more questions than it ever answers. Our key cast needs to be refined down and made the sharp focus – nothing and no one else. Lucy (Sarah Milde) is a bit of a prop, sorry to say, seemingly doing nothing except hovering around her and Connor’s modest home, and then re-emerging as a kind of spiritual presence; it’s both a lot, and too little to ask. Similarly, the film really should have given us more on our antagonist (Edward Boyd), who is often peripheral, with a shifting modus operandi and just not enough to work him up into a truly menacing figure.
So, without question, there are issues in this film. But there is the germ of a great idea here, and the film wants to be great, even if it’s hamstrung by budgetary restraints which emerge as pulled punches – the ultraviolence and speeding cars which you may expect often happen off-screen, when a bit more of this would have redeemed things. The Oz location looks great in a ‘wouldn’t want to be stuck out there’ way, and there are some moments where Whitrow is clearly channelling the grand old tradition of Ozploitation: the Oz flag being used as a face covering keys into this nicely. The colouration, the music, these are better than your average indie. Plus, there’s also a variety of camerawork, some decent attempts at action and a decent attempt to bring things together for a finale. There is talent here.
Whitrow clearly has an interest in the Outback as a setting for pursuit and fightback – his first short film, Hunt in Red, renders the formula down to thirty minutes as two teens flee a cannibalistic killer. So he has form, and he has the wherewithal: the recommendation has to be, then, to kill the filler, keep it linear and go all out. The sorts of audiences who would be drawn towards a film set in the back of beyond in Australia and titled ‘Roadkill’ would be likely to want more high action than we see here, so a more streamlined, pared-back storyline would do just the job, if the director has any plans to come back this way.
Roadkill (2022) gets a UK release on 29th May 2023.