**½/****
written and directed by Grant Scicluna
by Walter Chaw Joining Snowtown as Aussie films about sublimated desire, murder, perversion, and cults of personality, Grant Scicluna's feature debut Downriver is beautifully-lensed, patient, bleak. It reminds of another debut, Jacob Aaron Estes's 2004 Mean Creek, where, as in Downriver, the mute disinterest of Nature is used to highlight the struggle of individuals–especially children–to impose meaning on it. The title and central image of a river evoke Heraclitus's aphorism that it's impossible to ever enter the same river twice. Tied to the film's central conceit of James (Reef Ireland), a young man released from prison after taking the rap for the murder, as a boy, of a buddy whose body was never found, Downriver posits itself as a metaphor for the passage of time, for the unreliability of memory, and for the inability to recover the things of childhood once experience has sullied them. As a queer-interest film, to its credit, it portrays homosexual relationships as every bit the complex quagmire of their heterosexual counterparts. But as an attempt to reach towards some sort of archetypal eternity, Downriver is too self-consciously oblique, too hamfistedly mysterious. Kerry Fox is brilliant (Kerry Fox is always brilliant) as James's mother: another force of nature in a film obsessed with them, she is earthy, mercurial, bound by maternal duty, and transfixing in a centrepiece sequence in which her patience finally runs out. With a haunted final scene so burdened by symbol (in the water, in a well, on a beach–Harold Bloom would have a stroke trying to untangle this calcified knot) as to be rendered mostly inert, and a final shot of someone walking into frame that is fraught with meaning of some kind, Downriver is at the end a lovely frustration. While evoking Malick (and, closer to home, Andrew Dominik), it only clarifies Malick's simplicity. It suffers from First Film Syndrome: its framework can't support all that gravity. Programme: Discovery
