By Glenn Dunks
Did you see Letterboxd’s highest-rated film list for the first half of 2020? The film database site used by cinephile types to log and rate everything they see noted that this time last year the comparative 2019 list was topped by Avengers: End Game, none other than the highest-grossing movie of all time. This year’s top title on a newly lockdown affected list? Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau! Quite a change of pace to intergalactic superheroes, you have to admit. And followed by titles like And Then We Danced, Corpus Christi, First Cow and Vitalina Varela? As the kids say, you love to see it.
As audiences cannot rely on a regular stream of American content to plug into their necessary expanded viewing schedules, it is encouraging to consider that some people’s eyes may have been newly opened. I thought of this when watching two new Australian releases: Natalie Erika James’ haunting generational horror Relic, and Shannon Murphy’s perversely entertaining cancer drama Babyteeth...
Australian films often struggle to gain footing in the American arthouse market (for reasons too complex to go into here), but maybe they have a chance to permeate deeper like they deserve to.
Of the two, James’ Sundance premiere Relic is probably better served to find an eager audience on the couch due to its horror trappings. But while there may be haunted doorway portals and creepy things that go bump in the night, there’s more at play than just a ghost in the shadows (and I don’t just mean the nasty mold that infects the screen like a weeks-old bowl of fruit).
It’s the story of three generations of women (Robyn Nevin, Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote) and the plague of dementia that manifests in increasingly insidious ways. Nevin, an Australian legend of stage and film (Careful He Might Here You, Top of the Lake and The Matrix sequels being among her most recognisable screen work) is Edna, mother to Kay and grandmother to Sam, who lives alone in her ramshackle house out of the city on the edge of the forest. When the film begins, she has gone missing. Presumed lost in the woods, her daughter obviously fears the worst. But when she re-emerges seemingly fit and healthy, things are obviously not going to be what they appear.
In some ways it is the inverse of Murphy’s Babyteeth, which premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival where it won two awards. A suburban drama of a seemingly typical family whose sick teenage daughter craves desperately to escape a suffocating if well-intentioned life of normality in the face of cancer. Australian actor Eliza Scanlan, impressive if not particularly memorable (for me, at least) in Little Women, is Milla with Ben Mendelsohn (thankfully playing handsome normality again rather than space alien or sweaty creep) and The Babadook’s Essie Davis as the parents who drift in and out of parental neglect and domination depending on their moods (and in her case, her pill intake).
Milla craves independence, or at least the idea that her life is up to her. Rebellion takes the form of a flirtation with the older Moses, a character who locals would call (affectionately or otherwise) a ‘bogan’. He has a rat’s tail and tats on his face, walks around train stations shirtless and in thongs, and deals stolen pills on the street. He is played by Venice’s Marcello Mastroianni Award winner for Best Young Actor, Toby Wallace (second year in a row that award has gone to an Australian after The Nightingale’s Baykali Ganambarr in 2018).
Each film’s central conflict is essentially built around the question of how we cope and manage the realities of illness. Anybody who has dealt with dementia or a disease like cancer will know the often-unexpected ways that people choose to manage through it. And while both Relic and Babyteeth are vastly different films, they each nonetheless tell of how worlds get swept up and irrevocably changed for bad and good.
The performances in each are superb, also in complementary ways. Nevin and Scanlan are obviously tasked with playing too very different things at opposite ends of the human scale; one deeply confused and menacingly evil, the other energetic and unsure with a fierce motivation. They handle each perfectly, with Nevin in particular a stand-out who, to its writer/director's credit, is allowed deftly-handled quiet moments amid the expected demonic shenanigans. Mortimer as well as Davis and Mendelsohn must play differing tones of reason, anchors amid the storm that are in some ways audience surrogates while navigating their character's own independent course. And Heathcote and Wallace, exciting performers who both began on prime time soap Neighbours (for those playing along), are tasked as interlopers of sorts forced to get a fast education into complex adult relationships that they enter into somewhat naively and struggle to comprehend (one of them just happens to get stuck in labyrinthine crawlspace—not a euphemism, but definitely a metaphor).
Australian cinema has delivered some interesting, exciting, unexpectedly diverse films to audiences in 2020. Alongside the mainstream The Invisible Man, there was the revisionism of True History of the Kelly Gang, the contemporary cultural clash of In My Blood It Runs, the isolation monologue of The Beach, and the Oscar-submitted refugee-at-sea drama of Buoyancy. Relic and Babyteeth are easily two of the best and deserve the attention that is being newly focused on international cinema.
Babyteeth is now on VOD. Relic will be in cinemas and VOD from July the 10th.