Killing Ground – first look review

Despite hail­ing from a nation asso­ci­at­ed with sun, sand and surf, Aus­tralian film­mak­ers have long rel­ished explor­ing the dark­er side of their home­land, often scar­ing the beje­sus out of audi­ences in the process. In the con­tem­po­rary hor­ror tra­di­tion of Wolf Creek, Snow­town and the yet-to-be released Hounds of Love comes Killing Ground, a dusty jour­ney into hell cour­tesy of first-time fea­ture direc­tor Damien Pow­er. And while there may not be a meat cleaver or pow­er drill in sight, it’s just as like­ly to haunt audi­ences long after the cred­its have rolled.

The premise is ini­tial­ly famil­iar enough: a young cou­ple (played by Ian Mead­ows and Har­ri­et Dyer) arrive at a lake­side camp­site for a week­end get­away, only to dis­cov­er a neigh­bour­ing tent lying emp­ty. Clear­ly, some­thing is amiss – and soon enough, through a well-pre­sent­ed series of flash­backs, we are shown the miss­ing fam­i­ly (Maya Strange, Julian Gar­ner, Tiarne Cou­p­land and Liam and Riley Parkes), as they were, while also being intro­duced to a pair of local grifters (Aaron Ped­er­son, Aaron Gle­nane) who are clear­ly up to no good – although exact­ly what that is remains unclear. A suit­ably vicious mutt is usu­al­ly by their sides.

Mul­ti­ple nar­ra­tive threads are inter­wo­ven with great skill and visu­al flair, with Simon Chapman’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy, Katie Flaxman’s edit­ing and Leah Cur­tis’ score each impress­ing. The ten­sion ratch­ets up nice­ly. Even when the action becomes – per­haps inevitably – more con­ven­tion­al dur­ing the third act, Pow­er still finds time to throw in the odd sur­prise before we’re through. Some neat, divi­sive inter­play between the besieged cou­ple caps thing off with a suit­ably awk­ward twist. Shades of Straw Dogs and Deliv­er­ance work to strong effect.

Thank­ful­ly we’re spared the worst of the tor­ture-and-rape scenes which the miss­ing fam­i­ly endures in the nation­al park. What we do see is suf­fi­cient enough. Ped­er­son (best known as the brood­ing cop in Ivan Sen’s Mys­tery Road, and here play­ing against type to great effect) and Gle­nane are both ter­ri­fy­ing with their respec­tive char­ac­ters’ urges, which demand only sparse expla­na­tion and analy­sis in the film. For once, what is pre­sent­ed here is free of cliché and con­trivance. Even with a mod­est bud­get, this intel­li­gent­ly restrained work man­ages to remains authen­tic and tense throughout.

Killing Ground pre­miered in Sundance’s Mid­night sec­tion – a hal­lowed slot for hor­ror cre­atives and their rabid fans. With Park City hit by a del­uge of snow short­ly before the fes­ti­val began, there was lit­er­al­ly nowhere to run after the screen­ing. The set­ting worked a treat in terms of empha­sis­ing the chill­ing atmos­phere of this out-of-town hor­ror, not to men­tion Aus­tralian film­mak­ers’ repeat­ed suc­cess in shak­ing off their country’s peren­ni­al post­card image.