When a trucker discovers the body of a teenage girl by the side of the road, newly promoted detective Jay Swan (Aaron Penderson) is given the case as his first murder investigation. We quickly discover that the local police force is not too keen on Swan due to the fact that he is part of Australia’s indigenous population, and with the murdered girl from the same population, Swan discovers that his own people are also not as likely to help him since he now works for “the white man”.
Some recognizable faces pop up throughout, including Hugo Weaving as a cocky, menacing drugs investigator, and True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten as a nasty, racist hunter, but Penderson is put front and center throughout, and maintains our interest and sympathies throughout.
Shot beautifully in the scorched landscape of the Australian Outback, Mystery Road serves up a constantly convoluting plot that takes in everything from racial profiling, underage prostitution, drugs manufacturing, crooked cops and, most bizarrely, hyper intelligent wild dogs. With the whole movie told from Swan’s perspective, we’re constantly aware that there’s a lot going on that he – and therefore we – aren’t privy to, but writer/director Ivan Sen does a good job of both keeping us in the dark, while also keeping us guessing.
What he’s less successful is how the plot moves forward, with one deus ex machina after another, as Swan spends most of the movie accidentally stumbling over vital evidence. He needs to find the murdered girl’s phone? A random kid just walks up and gives it to him. He thinks some of his fellow cops are up to no good? He parks outside a barn at just the right time to see them doing some shady dealings. Stuff like this keeps happening throughout, and it takes some of the tension and intelligence out of what in some places feels like a Chinatown-like labyrinthine plot. Plus that stuff with the super smart dogs is never explained, like there’s a horror movie happening all the time, but just off screen.
A pretty decent detective thriller mixed with some western elements, but Mystery Road just doesn’t have the IQ to back it up properly.
