Weirdos in animal masks, summary executions, rituals that envelop you in a strange sense of predestination; thanks to the folk-horror crowd, you can’t go for a country walk these days without expecting to stumble into some uncanny pagan savagery. This Australian thriller subscribes unquestioningly to all of the above tropes, but its delicately splintered narrative and feel for outback disorientation and dismay mark out a distinctive trail – until it disintegrates to the point the film can only turn in circles.
Prodigal city girl Grace (Meg Eloise-Clarke) comes back to her home town in the bush to search for her missing brother David (Gautier de Fontaine), who saved her from their abusive father. Nosing around this depressing outpost, she hears rumours of a mysterious commune out in the wilderness drawing in local vagrants and drifters. Her uncle (Tony Hughes) warns her off investigating – but of course she ignores him, as well as the pile of keepsakes hinting at her family’s long involvement in cultist shenanigans. So she slings a few grand to her shady former geography teacher Mr Green (Leighton Cardno) to escort her out into the scrub.
Intercutting Grace’s forlorn interrogations with her panicky isolation in the countryside, director Joseph Sims-Dennett initially has one narrative chase another’s tail; they dovetail into a first half whose general oppressiveness grinds us down, while the fragmentation prickles us into alertness. It’s heightened by a sharp and impatient visual sense keen to root out grim outback picturesque as well as broken bones and toxic microbes inside Grace’s beleaguered body, and meting out action in abbreviated, comic-book-style beats.
Once Grace makes first contact, and comes back once more within the family embrace, the film tries to go full-on phantasmagoric. But the highly allusive storytelling style ultimately leaves insufficient meaning at the core of this quasi-psychedelic breakdown and too much generic pagan cavorting and leering. Even so, it’s a credible enough attempt at launching an Aussie branch of the global folk-horror brotherhood.
• The Banished is on digital platforms from 28 July.
