Welcome back to my nightmare. On the second night of October Mrs Simian and I ventured into the murky depths of some of our free Aussie streamers available through our public library. Beamafilm and Kanopy can be accessed for a limited number of views per month as 'tickets', and offer an interesting range of documentaries, TV series, movies and short form progamming. As you'd expect, there's a heavy Australian bias (as there is in another free channel, Brollie), but that inevitably also means some NZ content gets thrown in, because... our sunburned cousins do me like that.
So tonight's viewing was a documentary, The Darkside. Gorillamydreams is a bigly fan of supernatural reality slop like Finding Bigfoot (they haven't), Expedition X (not ex-enough, frankly), and Scared Stupid. I may have made one of those up. The Darkside is a bit less tongue in cheek, and purports to retell real-life eerie stories with the help of Australian actors (Deborah Mailman, Claudia Karvan, Bryan Brown, Jack Charles, among others) usually straight to camera with some landscapiness thrown in, and sometimes with their own craft helping to interpret things.
The Darkside (Warwick Thornton, 2013)
The tales in The Darkside are very much Australian stories, with a strong sense of location and history, and told largely from a First Nations perspective, as you would expect from Thornton's body of work (Samson & Delilah being the one I am most familiar with). The stories drift in and out, not linking with one another, nor presenting a throughline, but lingering in places wit some arresting images - a painting of a girl which turns into a landscape, and then back to a girl, stretches of slow camera tracks through dim museum corridors, mist coming in with the tide, and the unflinching stare of the narrators as they tell their stories straight down the barrel.
So onto the Halloweenometer: I can barely rate this one. We didn't finish it, although I may return. It's eerie, and unsettling in places - but it's not what I'm after for a Halloween watch, and I imagine that Halloween traffic is not what this movie is looking for. The most affecting story - and our checking out point was among those corridors of the Australian National Archive, and the stories of remains of indigenous peoples, inspected, prodded, measured, tested and examined and othered by a white scientists and physicians, reducing them to museum exhibits and dusty remains in indexed boxes. Genuinely unnerving, confronting and grim. Stories deserving to be told and remembered, but not in this context.
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