A Film Canon

Wolf Creek has become notorious as a peculiarly unwatchable example of torture porn - and, while it's certainly tortuous and unwatchable at times, it's not torture porn in any straightforward way. Most immediately, Greg McLean's screenplay, which loosely draws on various Australian backpacker and hitchhiker murders, doesn't contain any torture. Even the violence is, for the most part, brief and understated - someone is stabbed, someone is shot, and someone escapes from a nasty trap. What makes it seem so tortuous is that, unlike most torture porn directors, McLean is more interested in suspense than revulsion - or, rather, in raising suspense to such a pitch that it becomes revulsion. In doing so, he takes the emergence of low-budget, torture-driven horror as an indication that the horizon of what can be shown, or can be imagined to be shown, has once again receded to the point needed for suspense to be viable. By simultaneously holding out the prospect of some imaginably unimaginable torture as a suspenseful object, and denying the audience the catharsis of that object - the ending is surprisingly gentle - McLean makes suspense tortuous, positioning the audience somewhere between unbearable anticipation and unbearable retrospection. Not only does this combination of oppressive pastness and futurity bring the narrative's factual basis into chilling relief, but it imbues the entire film with a kind of heightened present tense - the presentness, or mindfulness, that most torture porn ultimately seems to be striving to achieve, and into which the killer eventually escapes in the final shot, between the end titles and the end credits. It's this suspenseful immanence that allows McLean to transform the Australian landscape into a repository of deep time, in a kind of inflection of Picnic Of Hanging Rock through grindhouse gloom - the narrative trajectory centres on Wolf Creek, a giant meteor crater, while the desert becomes increasingly astronomical, seeping into a crushing, concrete blackness that gradually turns every source of light into something terrifying, an iteration of the torturer's spotlight. Even the black comedy is too grim and austere to detract from McLean's unremitting vision, as evinced in the inspired casting of Better Homes And Gardens' John Jarratt as the killer - part of a dialectic between Australian hospitality and insularity, in which the garden shed becomes a torture chamber, a fortress raised to keep in inclusivity, even or especially in what appears to be one of the most desolate spaces on the continent.