TwitView: Fascinating & dark. Existential & bloody. A creepy slice of our possible future. B+

Wasting away ‘til the next season of The Walking Dead?  Dying for some post-apocalyptic action?  Well, The Rover probably won’t soothe your need for braaaaaaaains, but it’s a fascinating look at what life could really look like if our global economy went boink. And it’s a film where you may try your best to figure out what will happen, or what the end game will be, and you’ll have no idea.  Gotta give this film mad props for blowing up the usual tropes, and doing it in a way that left me with no other choice but to watch.

Okay, lemme get this straight; there’s a global economic collapse, and ten years later the AMERICAN DOLLAR is the strongest currency around?  Man, I worry about the human race.  But there you have it, and Eric (Guy Pearce, Memento) is just a man trying to take a load off out of the harsh Australian Outback sun.  But three bad guys steal his car, and instead of shrugging, Eric goes stalker and tries to get his car back.  Along the way he runs into Rey (Robert Pattinson, recovering sparklevampire), a brother of one of the guys that ripped off Eric.  And that’s the story.  Things go from bad, to worse, to kinda okay but still sucky, and then all over the freakin’ map as these two try to get Eric reunited with his car.  Before you pull out the Ashton Kutcher jokes, know this; that car, and the search for it, is a Macguffin; it’s the journey these two take that draws you in, not whether or not the car will ever be found.  And no, I’m not telling you.

Pearce, as man-with-a-car-mission Eric, is raw and dangerous here. But we don’t know anything about him, and that can be a bit off-putting at times.  He’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma, pissed off and sweaty.  This ain’t Felicia Jollygoodfellow (look it up, and then watch the movie.  Because awesome.)  This is one squinty-eyed lost soul that gives zero fucks.  And with people crucified along the side of the highway, flies everywhere (up the nose!  Gerroff!) and everything you eat has dust, dirt or god-knows-what-else in it?  Yeah.  Do you, Eric.

That’s difficult for folks like me that long to know if we should cheer or boo a character.  C’mon, post-economic-apocalypse!  Australia!  Mad Extremely Put Out Max!  But director David Michôd (the equally dark Animal Kingdom) doesn’t give quarter: he shows you what people could (and probably would) become if there was nothing left in the world besides going on another day.  Tidying up the package wouldn’t serve the purpose, and indeed would water down the tale.

Pattinson does wonders with Rey.  There’s a strange yet familiar cadence to Pattinson’s speach, as if Florida and West Virginia dialects got together and had an accent to call their own.  I didn’t feel quite so bad about not placing it after Pattinson said  that he “hadn’t really done proper hardcore dialect work on it”.   Either way, his Rey would fit in perfectly at a NASCAR race or Bluegrass concert, and Pattinson is riveting.  How’d this American sounding dude get to the Outback?  Don’t worry, it’s explained.  But as with much of The Rover, the play’s the thing, not the details.

Well fine, one detail sticks out plain as day, and that’s the soundtrack.  It starts off with a strange twang, as if a didgeridoo was lost and wailing for it’s mother.  There’s other, more tuneful melodies here, but as with the barren landscape, the soundtrack is stripped down and bleak.  It works perfectly to bring an extra bit of unsettling creepy to the proceedings.

At the film’s climax, there’s a whole lot of blood, but then again Pearce’s Eric ain’t exactly an angel.  What happened to him that he’s become so hardened?  Why is his quest so important to him?  What will happen next?  The Rover decides you don’t need a flowchart-like explanation to these questions.  And instead presents a startling look at a world where nothing matters but your own peace of mind.  Or whatever you’ve got that’s close to it.