Australian
Screen

Clip description

Having failed to get Rusty’s cooperation in the plot to kill her father, Katrina (Emily Barclay) steps up her campaign on Kenny (Anthony Hayes), her brother’s intellectually disabled friend. She goads him with the promise of sex and taunts him about his manhood, as measured by his ability to kill. In the supermarket, Rusty (Michael Dorman), who’s looking after her daughter Bailee, quickly catches on to her plan. He also taunts Kenny, but it’s clear he’s upset about being dumped by Katrina.

Curator’s notes

The presence of Anthony Hayes inevitably suggests a connection with an earlier film about male violence, The Boys (1998), in which Hayes played one of the three Sprague brothers. Both films take their initial inspiration from real murder cases, although Suburban Mayhem has been deliberately cagey about exactly which cases the script is based on. Scriptwriter Alice Bell has said she took aspects of Katrina from several different cases, then added the fact of the baby to accentuate the pressure and incongruity of the situations. The maternal theme does add a whole layer of horror to the story, because Katrina is no kind of mother. Both The Boys and Suburban Mayhem are about dysfunctional families, but the boys in The Boys do have a loving mother. In Suburban Mayhem, the absence of a mother is a double-edged sword. Katrina grew up without a mother; Bailee is growing up with Katrina as her mother, which might be a worse fate.