Kangaroo Island review – a tonally uneven family drama with a scene-stealing backdrop

The Guardian

11 hours ago

I suppose it was just a matter of time before an Australian film arrived called Kangaroo Island. That title certainly has an air of exportability – and, in director Timothy David's drama about family and home, an emotional double meaning. The 'island' represents psychological places in which we strand ourselves, and the 'kangaroo' represents the ways we hop over our … um … oh, who am I kidding? There's no double meaning: it's just the name of the actual island, located south-west of Adelaide, where most of the story takes place.
But this film certainly has international audiences in mind, beginning in Los Angeles where we meet Lou (Rebecca Breeds), an actor who some time ago caught the proverbial midnight train from Kangaroo Island and arrived in Tinseltown with big dreams. She's had a few gigs, but is in a career slump when she receives a plane ticket back home from her father Rory (Erik Thomson). Lou has no intention of actually going, but when engaged in an awkward situation with a police officer who pulls her over, uses the ticket to prove she's in a rush.
This leads to the first of several plausibility stretching moments: the cop insists on giving her a lift to the airport. I assume this would be a breach of protocol at the very least – are cops even allowed to be that helpful? The next comes at the airport, where Lou decides to kill time by getting smashed at a bar. The film cuts to her waking up from a nap and uh-oh, she's on the plane back home! Meaning she has drunk enough to board without really wanting to, but sober enough to be allowed on the flight?
Authenticity is everything in a modestly staged, relationship-centric drama like this; the last thing this film needs is for us to question whether it's believable. These moments are miscalculations by screenwriter Sally Gifford, though the film steadies when Lou arrives home, deploying several characters with whom she has complex longstanding relationships. These include her father, her born-again sister Freya (Adelaide Clemens) and her ex-boyfriend Ben (Joel Jackson), who is now Freya's husband.
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Ben's a bit of a douchebag, prone to making unhelpful confessions about still having feelings for Lou. I didn't quite buy this character; he felt more like a device for dramatic conflict than a person per se. But Lou, Freya and Rory are well developed and multifaceted. For me, the relationship between the two sisters was the highlight: a very authentic depiction of starkly different people – Lou being the more freewheeling, outgoing kind – with lots of hot emotions and unresolved issues between them.
Breeds, a former Home and Away star, gives Lou multitudes, crafting a character who's headstrong but vulnerable, and has a dangerous edge. You can feel she's capable of turning her life around but also sense she might go off the rails and pull others down with her.
Boosted by strong supporting performances from Thomson and Clemens, Breeds elevates a film that has quite a lot going for it but is tonally uneven; it can feel genuine one moment and confected the next. Some story developments are naturalistically divulged, such as the real reason Rory wanted Lou back on the island, which emerges around the dinner table at their family home – situated a stone's throw from a stunning beach (cue lots of pretty shots and visual scaffolding).
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Others feel much more contrived. Kangaroo Island has so few settings that, when Lou makes a trip to the general store, you can feel something is up; this trip must have special narrative significance. Indeed, an important plot development is divulged there that relates to the future of the family property, exacerbating tensions between Lou and Freya.
Sometimes I thought Kangaroo Island was about to devolve into Hallmarkian slosh and lose me completely, only for David (a first-time feature film-maker) to get me back on side, more or less, by creating small moments that really resonate.
Kangaroo Island is in Australian cinemas from 21 August