Limbo

Australian Noir at its finest

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Every few years the Australian director-writer Ivan Sen makes a superb crime film. Mystery Road, Goldstone and now Limbo. All are great, and all are harder to find than they should be.

Travis Hurley (Simon Baker) rides into the small outback community of Limbo to see if a twenty-year-old murder case is worth re-opening. Both the victim and the original suspects were Aboriginal, and the investigation was shot through with racism and disinterest.

This isn’t a crusade for Hurley, a chance for a Great Detective to Find the Real Killer. It’s more of a bureaucratic errand. He arrives in an air-conditioned sedan, listening to a gospel radio program, and covered with underworld tattoos. When his car is vandalized, Hurley rents an old Dodge. A former drug squad cop with a secret heroin addiction, he spends as much time holed up in his motel room listening to the interview tapes as investigating.

‘Holed up’ is the word. Much of the town of Limbo is built into the tunnels of a played out opal mine. His hotel room has rock walls, as does the local church. Visually this gives the film an incredibly textured look, as well as a Gothic tinge. The modern world doesn’t seem to exist here, and the past is difficult to access.

Sen’s previous films featured Aaron Pedersen as an Aboriginal detective, but Baker’s Hurley is a white interloper, an outsider. His biggest breaks in the case are given to him only once he earns the community’s trust, specifically the victim’s brother and sister (Rob Collins and Natasha Wanganeen, both excellent). The decisions he makes are informed by their wellbeing.

Sometimes it feels like Chandler’s description of the hardboiled revolution, “giving murder back to the kinds of people who commit it, and for reasons,” has run its course. So much of modern noir is either self-referential schtick or fantasies about being super cool and super tough. Every crime show on TV is either about a team of wonderful cops, each more wonderful than the next, or a private eye show that’s really about aliens or French espionage or psychics, or a cozy with a title like The Giggle Street Murder Chums.

Limbo is not any of those. It’s realistic yet threaded with symbolism, and it reflects something true and ugly about the world. It’s a terrific noir film.

Australia has a history of great crime film and TV, including the Jack Irish movies, The Empty Beach, I Wake in Fright, Long Weekend, Road Games, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Proposition, Animal Kingdom, Chopper…the list goes on. The original Mad Max wouldn’t be out of place on that list. As would Limbo, Mystery Road and Goldstone.

My barstool complaint about Canadian crime film and TV can be summed up in, “we should make stuff like Ivan Sen.”

Note: there’s a John Sayles film from 1999, also called Limbo and also pretty good.