Examining Limbo: Simon Baker Opens a Cold Case and Uncovers Searing Racial Tension in a Grippingly Atmospheric Outback Noir

There is a parched austerity to the Australian outback landscape, as well as a steeped in history of conflict between natives and encroaching occupiers, which makes it irresistibly well suited to the screen of westerns. But there's also a loneliness, a sense that its quiet vastness could engulf you without a trace, that also lends itself easily to a brooding, smoky mystery.

Indigenous filmmaker Ivan Sen has already tried his hand twice in the harsh, dry space where these genre possibilities overlap, in its "Goldstone" and "Mystery Road" features. In his latest and most successful film, "Limbo," he once again examines the region with a critical eye, finding a story of racial injustice in its sharp cracks and long shadows. But the genre styling this time was pushed to a stark monochromatic stylization. It's the black outback - slanting, secretive and as hard as the ground is hard - and Sen wears it well.

Certainly, with his straight cut jeans, his western shirt and his silver belt buckle which could attract the A man's attention Outside, the taciturn hero of "Limbo" looks less like a suave detective than a cowboy, a surly, crusading nameless man. It has a name, it turns out: Travis Hurley, a hardened police detective blown away to investigate a 20-year-old murder in the stark, desolate, fictional town of Limbo in South Australia. Played by a craggy, fashionable Simon Baker – initially almost unrecognizable and never better – with an air of exhaustion that meets its match in this exhausted opal mining community, he exudes more rogue menace than institutional authority: A child notices that he looks like a drug dealer, not a cop. (He does indeed have a persistent addiction to heroin.)

But Travis isn't exactly a thug. He conducts his cold case review with a quiet sense of duty and an unspoken hint of shame, aware that decades before him, white police officers failed to exercise due diligence in investigating the disappearance and murder of a young aboriginal girl, Charlotte Hayes. The investigation, we learn, has been loose and narrow, disproportionately and aggressively focused on Aboriginal men as suspects. No wonder those in Limbo who remember the fiasco are loath to speak when another pale stranger comes sniffing around.

Victim's brother Charlie (an excellent Rob Collins) looks at Travis with particularly cold suspicion: the Charlotte's murder, it appears, is one of many family and cultural losses that have changed her life forever. Her world-weary sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) is less hostile, but remains skeptical that reopening that wound will mean a lot. A single mother living modestly at the local restaurant, she also took care of Charlie's two children, and life in the present is hard enough without digging up the past. She is, however, intrigued by this gruff stranger who seems to carry his own burden of grief, and they strike up a tentative, not-quite-romantic rapport, beautifully played by Baker and Wanganeen with a mutually watchful reserve that hesitantly cracks into a candor. vulnerable.

Car trouble, meanwhile, forces Travis to prolong this seemingly hopeless case review, temporarily swapping his executive sedan for a wide, rusty Dodge that puts him in tune with the slow-paced decay of the entire city. So he sets out to explore its crevices, giving Sen enough space and time to delve into the geographical and atmospheric curiosities of this strange, windswept landscape. Many buildings here are carved into the rocks or underground – production designer Adam Head makes much of the sparse, cave-like menace of Travis' flea motel – while the local caves hold scorched secrets, unseen in the striking aerial shots that present Limbo as little more than a lunar quilt of craters and whirlpools of sand. Every ore seems to have long since been mined from the place; the inhabitants must live on the dirt that remains.

A virtual one-man band as a filmmaker, writer-director Sen also takes credit exclusive of cinematography, editing, music (sparse) and visual effects (even more sparse). This degree of control imparts less a sense of indulgence, however, than precise and exacting discipline – best demonstrated in the c...