'The Rover' (15)

 

***/****

Ten years after ‘The Collapse’, a band of thieves steal a car from the roadside and disappear over the horizon. Little do they realise that their new car belongs to a ruthless loner, Eric, a man who thinks nothing of violence and death. Pursuing the thieves across the bleak Australian landscape, Eric meets Rey, a brother of one of the thieves, and the pair form an uneasy partnership.

To say that The Rover is pretty bleak would be something of an understatement – this is a merciless, depressing study into Man’s tendency towards violence when He has no rules or structure to govern Him: crucified bodies line the empty highways; everyone carries a weapon and is unafraid to murder anyone who gets in the way; and all humanity seems lost. It’s also about the dangers of not wearing sun cream and going long periods of time without brushing your teeth. Guy Pearce is Eric, a hardened and violent man travelling across the barren wasteland of Australia. It has been well documented that David Michôd (the director and one of the screenwriters) wrote the part of Eric specifically for Pearce and it is hard to imagine anyone else in the role – Pearce looks every bit the part with grey, straggly hair, sun-aged skin, drab clothes, but with bright, dangerous eyes. Robert Pattinson is Rey, the half-wit brother, who Eric wants to kill but has to take along with him in order to track down his car. This is without doubt the best performance I have seen Pattinson give – he is wholly realistic in his staggered speech and awkward mannerisms, and even the accent is pretty good. It helps that Eric repeats most of Rey’s lines as it was difficult to understand him at times, but Pattinson really stood out in what is quite a complex role.

There is a refreshing lack of over-emotional backstory, with no flashbacks and no detailed exploration of how each man came to be in the place he is now in. In fact, even with the snippets of information we are given, it seems likely that neither man is telling the truth – we learn about the men through their actions rather than their words. Ambiguity is central to the film; we know nothing about ‘The Collapse’ (and are spared any forced exposition), nor a great deal about any of the characters, or indeed anything – this is just a small snap-shot into the life of Eric who knows what is happening and knows what he has to do without needing to explain. Eric and Rey wrack up a pretty impressive body count by the end (there are blood-splatters galore) but whereas the camera observes the violence at the beginning of the film, we look away from the headshots and moments of death later on, instead focusing on the faces of Rey and Eric and then turning to see the body. This doesn’t mean that the violence becomes less shocking, but instead the violence comes to mean something, whereas it was merely a normal action for Eric at the start.

I went as a group of four to see The Rover, and half of us liked it (if you can indeed ‘like’ a film such as this), whilst the other two hated it, calling it ‘pointless’, ‘without merit’ and wholly ‘unentertaining’. I agree that the film is perhaps not ‘entertaining’ in the conventional sense – if you go to the cinema to be amused and uplifted then this probably isn’t the film for you – but I did want to know what would happen to the characters and I was interested throughout. If you do go, just be warned that the wholly depressing tone does not lift throughout, so you may want to do something cheerful afterwards.