For all its punchiness, The Snowtown Murders feels derivative. It shares the grittiness of the previous year’s Animal Kingdom, as well as that film’s setting in a poor, urban community in Australia. There’s also a similar narrative aesthetic at work in the two films: a dramatic storyline punctuated by bursts of intense violence. And Snowtown even has the washed-out color palette of the earlier film and its active camera. Unsurprisingly, Adam Arkapaw is the cinematographer for both movies.
Yet Snowtown isn’t the achievement that Animal Kingdom is. The fact that we’ve seen most of these elements, and in combination, lessens the effect of this 2011 film, though director Justin Kurzel has perhaps tried to distinguish his film from Animal Kingdom by ratcheting up the violence and mixing more sexual scandal. However, the success of Animal Kingdom relies less on shock than on David Michôd’s giving us full characters in complex relationships and stressful situations, and Kurzel fails in that important regard. Both films give us big, silent, passive kids, but Michôd lets us understand and sympathize far more with J than we can with Kurzel’s Jaime here. And going beyond that, we also understand and sympathize far more with all of J’s brothers in Animal Kingdon than we can with Jaime’s. Animal Kingdom gives us family of people we understand and engage with, but Snowtown only gives us story elements that move us from one shock to another.
Kurzel effectively appropriates and intensifies many of the elements of Animal Kingdom, but despite all the shock, Snowtown feels more like an exercise than a film with a heart.
