Jindabyne (2007)

Guys on a fishing trip find a dead girl in the water, but wait a couple of days to report it so that they don’t have to cut their vacation short. There’s plenty of fallout from this act, both in the community and within their own families.

There’re a few things in this film that I simply didn’t get, a cultural undercurrent of Australian race relations that wasn’t fully explained, I think. The body wasn’t white and that became a thing -- there was something about the dead not being dead and an interrupted journey... I don’t know. In a pre-movie notice, there was a warning that said something about “for those in xx communities, there are images of deceased and they are named,” and during the movie a newscaster similarly warned before she uttered the name of the slain girl. I have no idea what’s going on there, but it would’ve been nice to have it explained for us ‘murcans.

As a whole, it felt rather disjointed. There were a lot of threads to this story and precious few of them were happy ones.

B-