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Gone (2007)

Synopsis

A young British backpacker, Alex (Shaun Evans), en route to join his girlfriend in Byron Bay, meets a friendly American outside a Sydney hostel. They have a wild night with two girls, then Taylor (Scott Mechlowicz) offers him a lift up the coast. In Byron, Alex is reunited with Sophie (Amelia Warner) and her new friend Ingrid (Zoe Tuckwell-Smith). They decide to continue north together with Taylor but, the next morning, Taylor says Ingrid has had to leave. As the three continue into western Queensland, tensions surface between the two men. Sophie and Alex decide to go on alone, until Taylor shows Alex that he still has a Polaroid he took back in Sydney. The photo shows Alex asleep with one of the women from their drunken night out. Alex almost crashes the car, as he realises the implication. The two men come to blows in the desert, and Alex tells Sophie about the photograph. She is upset and they argue in a motel in an outback town. Alex disappears, sending only a text message to say he’s leaving. Sophie continues with Taylor, until she realises that Taylor now has Alex’s phone.

Curator’s notes

by Paul Byrnes

Gone was inevitably compared with Wolf Creek (2005) when it arrived on screens in 2007, but it’s closer in theme to an earlier psychosexual Australian thriller, Dead Calm, from 1989. Scott Mechlowicz, as the American psychopath Taylor, even looks a little like the American psycho in that movie, played by Billy Zane. Both films use a triangle of three characters, between whom there are unexpressed sexual attractions. Instead of a boat, Gone strands them in a car in the desert.

Gone was developed as a low-budget thriller by an arm of Working Title, the highly successful British independent company. They gave it to commercials director Ringan Ledwidge as his debut feature. The script was co-written by James Watkins and Australian playwright Andrew Upton.

It’s an unusual thriller in that most of the violence is psychological – unlike Wolf Creek (2005). The trouble between Alex and Sophie begins with a small act of betrayal, when he gets drunk with Taylor in Sydney. Alex can’t remember what happened, if anything. It continues with Sophie not recognising her own attraction to Taylor. Sexual jealousy festers between them because they’re young and fearful that too much truth might ruin their relationship. As in most modern horror, a small human frailty leads to retribution on a grand scale – as in an ancient Greek morality play.

Like Wolf Creek (2005), the film was calculated to appeal to a British audience that had been primed by a number of violent deaths of British tourists in Australia in the preceding decades, especially the ‘backpacker murders’ near Sydney and the presumed death of Peter Falconio in the desert in 2001. Wolf Creek (2005) was inspired partly by both of these crimes, but it takes a much more brutal and violent approach than Gone. The commonality is the idea that the isolation in the Australian outback can be fatal, especially for the young and seemingly innocent – a theme that has many earlier examples in Australian cinema, notably Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

Both Gone and Wolf Creek (2005) also concentrate their attention on women as targets of male violence, a staple technique in screen horror, but there’s a sense in Gone that Sophie contributes significantly to the unhappy situation that develops between the three characters. One question left unanswered is whether Taylor would have attacked Alex anyway, without the presence of Sophie. As they leave Sydney, Alex tells him he doesn’t have a girlfriend, for no obvious reason. Perhaps Alex doesn’t trust the guy already, or maybe he thinks Taylor would prefer that it was just the two guys travelling together.