Claire (Aisling Franciosi of a Gillian Anderson TV show and a Ken Loach movie) is a poor, doomed to a life of servitude for some past crime, then she has a very bad day when her husband and baby are murdered by soldiers and she is repeatedly raped. It’s a bleak movie, but at least it’s got… I don’t really know what it’s got besides the bleakness. Sometimes there are shots looking straight up at the sky through the trees, but this dwarfing of the action by towering nature only serves to make our heroine seem more trapped and insignificant. Plus, those shots didn’t hold up on the 4:3 DCP projection from my vantage at front of the theater – neither did the forest in general.

She teams up with “Billy,” an aboriginal with a similarly tormented past, to track and slay the soldiers (led by Sam Claflin of My Cousin Rachel), who continue to behave just horribly, betraying and murdering everyone along the way until the soldiers get to a major town and are welcomed by society, so our heroes must got on a final suicide mission to clean up. Harry Greenwood (son of Hugo Weaving) dies first, doesn’t make it to town, but Damon Herriman (I saw him playing Charles Manson yesterday) fights to the end. Kent’s followup to The Babadook, which was Ash’s final movie.