Life goes topsy-turvy Down Under.
By Jonathan Kiefer
We moviegoers can be such assholes. It’s not enough to project our shabby selves into so many better-looking lives. Just as often, apparently, we need to sit back in the dark doing nothing while other less clever souls plod haplessly toward their own doom.
And so, stuntman-turned-director Nash Edgerton, writing with Matthew Dabner and his brother Joel, sticks us in
The Square
, whose rigid geometry tempers a plenitude of twists into a finite number of sharp, enclosing corners. It’s a nifty little neo-noir thriller and may even qualify as a horror movie as well, given its characters’ customary series of unfortunate choices: adultery, arson, blackmail, homicide and insufficient foresight to keep a cell phone battery charged in case of emergency.
Naturally, these choices result in the time-tested cinematic satisfaction of seeing people dig themselves a hole, fill it with quicksand and just wade right in—or at least drop a corpse into that hole and then hasten to fill it with cement.
Ray (David Roberts) is a middle-class construction supervisor in a small Australian town—a man ostensibly too clean for the dirty work he oversees. But not for long. He’s already taking contractor kickbacks, and there is also the matter of Carla (Claire van der Boom), a woman Ray loves who is not his wife. Carla also is unhappily married, to a man (Anthony Hayes) with thuggish tendencies and a bag of cash hidden in their attic.
Can you see where this is going? Carla and Ray can’t, not quite. They just need it to finally go somewhere. She wants to pry him free from his life; he, like many lovelorn noir dupes before him, wants to please her. They go about all this in the worst ways possible.
Do they not have Murphy’s Law in
Australia
? No. Wait, they do. Things go quite wrong indeed for Carla and Ray. Fate shows no mercy. Perhaps to prove this point, their dogs have a tryst going on, too, and that doesn’t work out very well either.
The Square subtly reminds us to consider the ominous implications of places called “the outback” and “Down Under.” In fact, The Square’s sense of place is exceptional. We can feel the metabolism of this little town and how it changes with the raising of Ray and Carla’s little hell.
Like the Coen brothers, to whom they’ve inevitably been compared, the Edgertons have a remorseless streak. It makes for very energetic filmmaking and, potentially, some moral concern. The Square is dark, quiet and almost coldly disciplined, with rigorous editing of script and image, characters drawn just clearly enough, musical cues used only sparingly and, therefore, very effectively, and about as right a ratio of accidental to intentional deaths as a movie can have.
In other words, it gives us moviegoing assholes just what we want.
The Square
Directed by Nash Edgerton
With David Roberts, Claire van der Boom, Joel Edgerton, Anthony Hayes
UA Devargas
105 min.
R
