Australian
Screen

This title is about:
Aboriginal Australian tribal customs, religion, and social hierarchies

What I like most about this title:
This murder-drama eschews all of the traditional characteristics one would associate with the legal murder mystery film. The narrative is foregrounded in the controversy surrounding a suspected Aboriginal ritualistic murder in Sydney. The purposefully slowed and stymied acquisition of details on the incident for protagonist David Burton (Richard Chamberlain) leaves one with a heightened sense of discomfort. In the midst of this harrowing crime, a series of climatological phenomena radically affects the surroundings, from painfully forceful torrential downpours to piercingly sharp chunks of hail. Somehow, there is a parallel between these two events. Director Peter Weir deftly implies the correlation between these strange happenings as seen in the continual visual references to water (the clandestine exchange that occurs in a sewer prior to the murder, rains disrupting Sydney commuter traffic, the presence of Katsushika Hokusai's sublime seascape print "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa" in Burton's bedroom, etc.). Moreover, the storyline serves as a powerful commentary on the relations between white Australians and native Aboriginals. The inclusion of Sydney's historically Aboriginal neighborhood of Redfern and conversations on the elimination of indigenous local tribes is a stark reflection on the tragic legacies of settler colonialism in Australia.

What I like least is:
N/A

I saw this title:
on TV

The best place to watch this title would be:
HBO Max as it contains an exceptionally curated selection of films from The Criterion Collection.

This title would be a perfect double bill with:
The 2018 series "Wrong Kind of Black" for its focus on the racial discrimination of Aboriginal Australians in urban centers during the 1970s.