Australian
Screen

Suburban Mayhem is both a savage satire of Australian life in the first years of the 21st century and an enigmatic – almost affectionate – portrayal of a suburban monster. Katrina Skinner, as portrayed in an astonishing performance by New Zealand actress Emily Barclay, is the Lady Macbeth of Golden Grove, a fictional suburb in an Australian city. The daughter of a drug addict, a single mother, in love with her brother, quite possibly sharing a bed with her father, Katrina has learned all she needs to know about men by the time she’s 19. As she tells Lilya, her innocent ‘beauty therapist’ (Mia Wasikowska), the way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach, but his pants – not that she’s interested in anyone’s heart but her own (and perhaps her brother’s). Katrina controls every man in the small kingdom of her own influence with an overpowering sexuality. Those she cannot seduce, she threatens (as with the cop played by Steve Bastoni, whose marriage she almost wrecks). She uses straight intimidation on women too, but they’re not her prey: men are more fun to manipulate, and she’s an expert. Her only real vulnerability is her brother, with whom she has a passionate bond – so passionate that he may even be the father of her child, the unfortunate Bailee, a toddler she dumps constantly on anyone stupid or kind enough to believe one of her many stories.

The film portrays her without a hint of moral condemnation and with a certain respect for her power. She never gets what’s coming to her, unless it’s the house with a picket fence and an ocean view that she’s always wanted, the spoils of the games she started. On the other hand, she never gets her brother back either, and the realisation that he doesn’t want to be with her is the only sign that she actually feels pain or regret. The film’s refusal to condemn her doesn’t extend to the people around her, though. Indeed, that’s perhaps the film’s main purpose. It’s a fairly savage attack on the mean-spirited, double-fronted, brick and tile mediocrity of the great Australian suburbs – somewhere between the happy idiots of the TV comedy Kath and Kim, and the murderous family dynamics of The Boys.

Whether this is an attack on the working class is an interesting argument. Katrina thinks work is for losers. Most of the characters don’t define themselves by work, although the film is careful to show us that Katrina’s father and her boyfriend Rusty both have steady jobs. One could argue that many of these people are shown as fundamentally decent or trying to be, so there’s a sense that she’s like a plague that befalls them. On the other hand, there’s also a sense that Katrina comes out of the conditions of life in this place. She’s the killer they had to have because they live barren lives without culture, beauty or a sense of the spirit. The film never tries to prove whether this is true; in a sense it doesn’t matter, because Katrina might not behave differently in a different social milieu. She’s a force of nature, and there haven’t been many figures like her in contemporary Australian film (although the presence of Geneviève Lemon, who played Sweetie in Jane Campion’s film of the same name, might suggest an influence).

The script was written by the then 27-year-old (in 2006) Alice Bell, a self-confessed true crime addict who attends trials for fun. The character of Katrina was suggested by a couple of real cases. The director Paul Goldman has said he knew women like her in his own upbringing, which is a sobering thought.