Dis­cov­er Australia’s dread-filled answer to The Shining

Peter Weir’s Pic­nic at Hang­ing Rock did not just ush­er in, along with Ted Kotcheff’s Wake In Fright, an ambi­tious­ly art­ful, the­mat­i­cal­ly res­o­nant strand of Aus­tralian hor­ror. It also gave, right from its geo­graph­i­cal­ly spe­cif­ic title, new mean­ing to the ​‘Vic­to­ri­an’ part of Vic­to­ri­an Gothic.

Its nat­ur­al suc­ces­sor is 1982’s Next of Kin, also set in rur­al Vic­to­ria and also draw­ing on the tropes of goth­ic lit­er­a­ture: a dark old house, uncan­ny echoes of the past, buried fam­i­ly secrets, and mur­der most foul. Direct­ed and co-writ­ten (with Michael Heath) by New Zealand-born Tony Williams, Next of Kin surfs the low-bud­get ​‘Ozploita­tion’ rip curl of the Aus­tralian New Wave, and spends its Euro­pean inher­i­tance on a local almost-ghost sto­ry with a strong sense of place.

It begins, like so much goth­ic fic­tion, with a return. Fol­low­ing the death of her moth­er Mary, teacher Lin­da Mary Stevens (Jac­ki Karin) comes home as the sole heiress to Mary’s estate – the 19^th-cen­tu­ry prop­er­ty of Mont­clare, repur­posed and run by Mary as a care home for the elder­ly. It is a beau­ti­ful old place, with its gar­den grounds and colo­nial fix­tures, but the wiring is faulty, the plumb­ing plays tricks, and the building’s shad­owy hall­ways, like its age­ing res­i­dents, rip­ple with death and decay.

As Lin­da decides what to do with her bequest, she dis­cov­ers her mother’s old diaries, which chron­i­cle Mary’s ris­ing fear that some­one or some­thing evil was in the house with her. Quick­ly Lin­da is infect­ed with the same sense of dread, even as one of the res­i­dents is found drowned in the bath, trig­ger­ing in Lin­da a half-mem­o­ry from her own Mont­clare child­hood. As house nurse Con­nie (Ger­da Nicol­son) and doc­tor Bar­ton (Alex Scott) appear to be con­spir­ing to cov­er up a secret, Lin­da must deter­mine whether there real­ly is a mys­te­ri­ous killer at large, or whether mad­ness is just part of the Stevens fam­i­ly legacy.

It may end in flames, but Next of Kin is a slow burn, care­ful­ly build­ing its ten­sions before allow­ing them to explode. Though set express­ly amid a heat­wave and bush­fire warn­ings, the film fea­tures thun­der­storms and goth­ic rain­fall aplen­ty. Indeed, it is a tale of ris­ing damp and flood­ing waters, as sub­merged truths grad­u­al­ly resur­face – and only in the famous sin­gle take with which it ends is the ele­ment of fire allowed to take over again.

This spec­tac­u­lar shot, the result of a hap­py acci­dent which cap­tures the after­math of a spe­cial effect trig­gered at the wrong time, shows Lin­da final­ly burn­ing her bridges to the past and dri­ving for­ward to a new­ly lib­er­at­ed future fur­ther down the road. Before that, Williams and his DoP Gary Hansen deploy all man­ner of cant­ed angles and insid­i­ous track­ing shots to defa­mil­iarise the fam­i­ly space, sug­gest­ing the tox­ic can­cer lurk­ing in the Stevens gene pool.

Next of Kin is released by Sec­ond Sight on Blu-ray plus Down­load and On Demand on 25 March.