"The Rover"

As the zombie craze extends its media empire from film and television to video games, and the ever-growing list of one-size-fits-all “young adult” dystopian novels and subsequent film adaptations shows no sign of shrinking, you’d be forgiven for greeting The Rover with the same weariness and disillusionment that permeates the majority of the post-apocalyptic genre: Is this going to be another dark and nihilistic film populated by selfish, greedy weirdoes who communicate through violence rather than dialogue? The Rover would answer your question affirmatively, all while making a substantial case for itself. What it lacks in the sharp satire and poignancy that made the best of George A. Romero or the soul-searching that typified John Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road, it makes up for in terms of mood, atmosphere and acting.

While David Michôd, whose 2010 debut Animal Kingdom was one of that year’s best films, occasionally relies a little too much on auteurist practices learned from other films – long still shots of landscapes and corpses, sound design that emphasizes movement noises, long tracking shots following the main character (Guy Pearce) from the back as he walks from one place to another – he nonetheless displays an indisputable talent for breathing strange life and beauty in his dirty deserted wasteland, helped by Antony Partos’s otherworldly and at times semi-atonal score. Skirting a fine line between characterization and caricature, he and actor/co-storywriter Joel Edgerton populate their film with figures whose visual and behavioral otherness (including a dwarf, two skinny East Asian men and a soft-spoken old woman who prostitutes her own grandson) is noted but never used against them, and semi-competent crooks whose bickering and clumsiness wouldn’t be out of place in Pulp Fiction.

Standing prominently amongst this gallery of oddballs is Robert Pattinson, whose twitchy slack-jawed southern-accented performance as mentally retarded criminal Rey could easily collapse into histrionic parody but ends up as one of the film’s strongest points. Avoiding condescending pathos and scenery-chewing, Pattinson plays Rey like a lost boy in search of manhood and finding in Guy Pearce’s rugged bearded stoic protagonist an unlikely father figure. Nothing exceptionally original of course but David Michôd’s strong command of his material and actors helps The Rover transcend its lacunas to reach, in its best scenes, the kind of macabre wit it aspires to.