The Rover review – Ozbilly shaggy dog story loses its way

You might call the new picture from Australian director David Michôd a dystopian Ozbilly noir set in a ruined future: it's violent, alienated and speckled with gruesome little details. You could also call it a shaggy dog story – if the dog in question was red of eye and foamy of mouth. There's a flavour of the 70s Australian new wave, and even something of Spielberg's Duel. But after a terrific start, the film begins to lose its way, and its grip, and it isn't as good as Michôd's earlier feature, Animal Kingdom. Robert Pattinson plays a young, scared guy called Rey, part of a gang of American armed robbers who have left him for dead in the dusty road after their raid went horribly wrong. Why Americans are in this particular part of Australia is never explained, and I suspect the original script Michôd developed with Joel Edgerton has been modified for casting reasons. Having crashed their truck, the gang impulsively steal a parked car belonging to a bearded loner called Eric, played with blazing-eyed intensity by Guy Pearce. With fanatical determination, Eric sets out to get his car back, using Rey to help him in this quest. The car is perhaps the last vestige of his self-respect, or maybe, somewhere in his scorched soul, he thinks that using it as the pretext for brutally violent revenge is an appropriately suicidal farewell to all happiness. The script meanders around as it makes a tour of all the freaky, scary figures out there in the wasteland: feral exotics in a weird, Diane Arbus-like world of their own. Michôd creates ambient menace and Pearce has a simmering presence. But there is a bit of muddle: the business with the truck and the car doesn't quite make sense, and the post-apocalyptic future hasn't been very rigorously imagined. Still, Michôd certainly delivers some brain-frazzling heat and directionless despair.

• Interview: Guy Pearce
• First-look review: The Rover