good.film
2 years ago
Travis, a jaded detective, arrives in the remote outback town of Limbo to investigate the cold case murder of local Indigenous girl Charlotte Hayes 20 years ago. As truths about the murder begin to unfold, the detective gains a new insight into the unsolved case.
The remote town of “Limbo” is a fictional place, but the characters in the film are all stuck in their own personal limbo. By exploring the deeper impact of an Indigenous family’s trauma through the eyes of a white detective, we experience their pain, gain insights into the complexities of loss, and feel the impact of the justice system on Aboriginal families in Australia.
First Nations People, Law & Justice
It’s usually the dust that tells you you’re on a cinematic journey into the Aussie outback. Plumes of it: red clouds billowing from the rear end of the hero’s chariot (probably a Ford, like Mad Max, or a Holden).
But there’s no red dust in Limbo, because there’s no red at all. The stark and arresting black and white images of Indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen’s new feature give us an immediate new way of seeing our own dry, unforgiving land.
And not just the land: Limbo opens with a montage of a traditional Aboriginal ‘dot’ painting being created. In monochrome, drained of its usual warm ochre and blood red tones, we notice the shapes and form more than we normally would. We soon discover that this set of shapes is inherently linked to these characters’ story.
The painting is a flashback; the artist, teenage Indigenous girl Charlotte Hayes. She went missing 20 years ago from a roadside in the opal mining town of Limbo, and that’s the state her family have been living in since. Her brother Charlie and sister Emma, now adults, are stuck somewhere between that past and the present - unable to mourn, still burning for answers.
They’re victims, but the local police - and a racially biased justice system - have made Charlie and Emma feel like they are the criminals; first to be blamed, and then ignored. For them, Charlotte’s disappearance is far from a ‘cold case’.
Sent to find answers - it’s “an official review” - is Detective Travis Hurley: short on words, weary and detached. He arrives in Limbo ahead of those clouds of white dust thrown up by his modern Holden (told you), checks into a surreal, Tatooine-like motel - built underground, to escape the oppressive heat - and makes himself comfortable.
For Travis, that involves a spoon, a needle and a flame. Immediately, we know that it probably won’t just be the local’s secrets that are revealed during Travis’ stay in Limbo.
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Surrounded by silvery piles of earth that look like ash, Limbo seems like a town where hope’s been abandoned. If Travis was hoping for a warm embrace and some quick info from the locals, those hopes are quickly abandoned too.
“Didn’t see nothin’” and “don’t remember nothin’” are the main replies Travis gets to his calm prodding around Charlotte’s last known whereabouts. The locals (mainly Black) don’t trust this white outsider; like the visuals, Travis’ case is clearly one of Black vs. white. It’s not the last use of the metaphor: Travis’ hotel room tiles are checkerboarded in black & white; when his Holden breaks down, he rents an ageing black Dodge sedan.
Crunching that Dodge through the dusty gravel to Charlie’s caravan, Travis is greeted by the end of a rifle. There’s some begrudging, grunted dialogue between the cop and the missing girl’s brother. Not much more from the sister Emma, either, at work in the sole cafe of this town where time seems at a standstill. But Travis persists - and the more he learns about the family of Charlotte Hayes, the more he’s drawn to them and he sees the way they’ve been treated. To the cops, their sister’s disappearance is meaningless.
Historically, the way that Indigenous families have been dealt with by law enforcement, and the intergenerational trauma this has cast, has been shameful. It’s a point that director Ivan Sen was keen to illustrate with Limbo. “Australia is still a place of injustice for Indigenous Australians,” Sen points out. “We are still living in an occupied country where the occupiers largely feel the land belongs to them, and the Police and the Justice System often don’t really investigate or deal properly with crimes [such as] missing Indigenous persons.”
Sen’s thoughts are underlined by a former Western Australia police officer (now state Greens senator) who saw these behaviours with their own eyes. In an interview with SBS, Senator Dorinda Cox confirmed that she observed a clear and shocking difference, with a far more “casual” police response to First Nations missing persons - and a common & pervasive idea within police stations that Indigenous women were ‘itinerant’.
“The view that First Nations women's lives don't matter in this country is the hangover from colonisation,” said Cox. “There is a very, very large view that they just lead a very casual life and therefore [missing women] have just taken off or ‘gone walkabout’.”
To back that up with numbers: according to the ABC, in New South Wales, 10% of females not found since 2014 are Indigenous women - but Indigenous women make up less than 3 per cent of the state’s population.
While Emma’s still on guard, she’s growing less wary of Travis, and extends an invitation where more comes to light about these characters. Perhaps that’s unsurprising in a setting where plenty of us are at our most comfortable: at the dinner table, over a home-cooked chook.
Travis meets Emma’s young daughter & niece, who grill him about his relationships, and about being a detective. “I’d never want to be a cop,” one says to him. Why’s that? “Because they let someone take my Aunt Charlotte away. And they locked up my uncle.”
After the kids are in bed, Travis spots some familiar art on the wall: the dot painting we saw being created at the film’s opening. Emma reveals that it was Charlotte’s… she loved to paint. She wanted to be an artist when she grew up. Travis asks her, What do these symbols mean? Emma explains that they’re family. Sister, brother, mother. After a beat, Travis asks the question hanging in the air: No father? Emma’s reply is blunt and telling: “No. We paint the fathers separate from the family.”
It’s a metaphor that’s heavy with painful resonance for Travis, who’s clearly processing some father-son loss of his own. The dark irony is that he’s investigating the lives of others (lives either present, or lost) while searching for answers about his own life that haunt him.
Could this be what helps guide Travis closer to Charlie? He begins to open up to the detective: they’re both men in pain, and they recognize it in each other. And it gives Travis the opportunity to help reconnect Charlie with his estranged son. As director Ivan Sen puts it: “He’s a man looking for salvation… and he finds himself in a situation to do something about it.”
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If you’re a longtime fan of stunning, isolated landscapes and smalltown mistrust and mysteries in your movies - No Country for Old Men, say, or Winter’s Bone or Fargo - then Limbo is a cinematic experience you won’t want to miss.
The bone-white setting of the mined earth proves an eerie metaphor for the characters’ buried longing and their loss. There’s the obvious (detective Travis is digging for clues like opals; his hotel room is literally underground, in a bleached and echoing cavern) and then there’s the sublime: the enormous wide spaces juxtaposed against the intimacy of personal trauma and grief.
Multi-hyphenate filmmaker Ivan Sen has captured it all in glassy-smooth, black & white widescreen. The aerial shots, following Travis’ ancient black Dodge as he traverses through endless mounds and mine holes, makes Coober Pedy look like the surface of the moon: a brittle, alien world. It’s been sucked dry, but there’s still an unnatural beauty to the environment.
Vistas aside, it’s the bittersweet human story of loss and connection that resonates. While the characters of Limbo are hardened souls, finding each other changes them. They’re reminded of their compassion, and at least three of our characters (we won’t spoil who) find their version of redemption. So while the parched environment is bleak, the empathy and humanity that Sen creates within Limbo is far from it.
Limbo is now screening at select cinemas Australia-wide.