OBSERVER: Kangaroo Island
The undoubted star of the new film Kangaroo Island is the spectacular coastal scenery of the South Australian island itself.
It’s a perfect setting for a family drama, which opens in Hollywood where estranged daughter Lou’s (Rebecca Breeds) promising acting career has not achieved the heights predicted for her.
She returns to her childhood home on Kangaroo Island, to try to reconnect with her sister Freya (Adelaide Clemens) and her initially taciturn father (Erik Thomson).
When we meet Lou initially, she is a vacuous spoilt brat who feels the world owes her a living. Over the course of the film, Breeds reveals reasons for her difficult character, and it is heartwarming to see Lou grow into a multi-layered and compassionate person in response to potentially tragic happenings around her.
As the newly converted evangelical Christian sister Freya attempts to share her faith with Lou, predictably, sparks fly. Completing the quartet of lead actors is Freya’s husband Ben (Joel Jackson), who begins the film as the most likable character, but all is not as it seems.
There are several secrets the family must deal with along the way, and watching how the characters develop as they cope gives the film some depth.
Thomson is terrific as the father in a finely nuanced performance. Breeds’s performance is also a skilled one, as she manages the transformation from shallow to complex and compassionate in her later dealings with her father.
Clemens and Jackson handle their roles effectively. There is a typically Australian sense of humour running through the film about Lou’s presumably lost luggage, that will have you chuckling.
Kangaroo Island is a debit feature film of Timothy David and his actor-wife Sally Gifford. While the couple have been based in New York for 20 years, in 2016 they bought a holiday house on Kangaroo Island, so the film is a labour of love, and it has the hallmarks of a first film.
It is a pleasant enough night at the cinema, but it didn’t set my heart on fire, and I found the constant music from Ariel Marx intrusive – it’s effective but there is too much of it, and more silence would have enhanced the film.
Nevertheless, Kangaroo Island is worth seeing for Erik Thomson and Rebecca Breeds and the truly fabulous cinematography by Ian McCarroll.
Julie Houghton
Pictured: Erik Thomson