The Snowtown Murders (aka
Snowtown) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie,
Animal Kingdom, with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by
Adam Arkapaw). But where
Animal Kingdom shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers,
Snowtown depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but
Animal Kingdom, for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas
Snowtown is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with
Animal Kingdom would be with
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.)
Though in some ways
Snowtown is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming teenager to a participant in multiple murders, fundamentally the character is a conduit through which we get to know John Bunting, a charismatic, ebullient fellow who thinks all homosexuals are pedophiles and all pedophiles deserve to be tortured and killed. He happily expounds on his ideas to anyone who will listen, but only a few know how seriously he believes in what he says.
Jamie Vlassakis and John Bunting are real people, and
Snowtown is closely based on
actual crimes that occurred in South Australia from 1992 to 1999.
Snowtown sits north of a Adelaide, and the crimes became associated with it because the murderers, who didn't live in the town, ended up storing the bodies there in barrels of hydrochloric acid hidden in a disused bank vault. Viewers of the film who know at least a rough outline of the actual story may go in expecting a dramatization of the events or a police procedural, perhaps an upscale version of the Discovery Channel's vulgarly ghoulish
documentary.
Such expectations would be disappointed, though — more than disappointed: frustrated. We spend at least the first half hour of the film with little or no knowledge of quite who the characters are: names only come up now and then, people appear and disappear in Jamie's life. And that's clearly the point. Looking at the
shooting script, we can see that some of this information existed in
Shaun Grant's screenplay, but was either not shot or was removed in editing. As viewers (particularly as first-time viewers), we are only slowly given the information we need to sort out who is who and what their feelings, desires, or motives are, if we are given that information at all. Even in the second half of the film, where the story and characters have become clearer, numerous details are elided or hidden in hints. Bunting committed plenty of murders that Jamie Vlassakis was only vaguely aware of, or didn't know about at all, but the film doesn't simply keep us within his realm of knowledge (though often it does do that) — instead, it evokes his sense of confusion by denying us information easily known to the characters. More than that, it creates a sense of a continuous present by scrupulously avoiding any explication of the characters' pasts. We cannot know who people are in this film except through their immediate self-presentation and actions. We see their clothes, their facial expressions, their movements. We hear fragments of their conversations. Eventually, we see them as perpetrators or victims of torture and murder.