Normally I’d try and put up a proper poster for a film review, but I couldn’t find a good quality one for Bedevil so I’m making do with this newspaper ad for its Palace Cinemas run (the Verona was a few years from opening, clearly)… also, the top quote about “TRULY MARTIAN CINEMA” from the Guardian critic is kind of noteworthy, partly because there’s a vague whiff of racism to describing this film, the first feature made by an Australian indigenous woman, as “Martian”, but also, to be honest, it kind of sums up my own reaction to it. Tracey Moffatt isn’t really a conventional filmmaker, so not surprising that Bedevil isn’t the most conventional film; I suppose it’s like an indigenous version of Kwaidan, albeit at half the length… good thing, to be honest, cos another hour and a half of this would’ve ended me. We have a folk horror-ish anthology of three ghost stories revolving around indigenous characters, though as Moffatt also noted the stories themselves aren’t “particularly white or Aboriginal” (the first ghost is actually an American GI), and while it’s obviously historically important I can’t honestly say I liked it. The kind of ratty copy I watched on YT probably didn’t help (a good print might at least make it nicer to look at), but a lot of it is down to Moffatt’s treatment of the material… it’s not as deliberately artificial and anti-naturalistic as her short Night Cries which I saw back in my UNSW days, but it’s still pretty stylised and distant in a lot of ways and I found it pretty uninviting. And frankly I kind of hated Carl Vine’s score, which felt hopelessly unsuited to the whole thing and at times more of a parody of horror film music. Kept taking me out of a film I could barely get into in the first place.
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