The Rover (review)

The 1970s saw a drastic rise in film production in Australia – a result of increased government funding and tax incentives – referred to as the Australian New Wave. With this rise came increasing thematic and aesthetic engagement with the project of Western civilisation, specifically its precarious boundaries and the antinomies that manifest themselves in the residue of the Australian settler-colonial scene. This period of Australian filmmaking gave birth to Mad Max (Miller Australia 1979) and its sequel, The Road Warrior (Miller Australia 1981). While comparisons between David Michôd’s The Rover and The Road Warrior are perhaps overstated at times, The Rover does pick up some very similar threads. Set in a dystopic Australian outback that serves as an extrapolation of our own world ‘post-collapse’, the plot of The Rover follows an unnamed man (Guy Pearce) hunting down his stolen car with recklessness and tenuously suppressed rage. His search is fuelled by the loss of something ambiguous but clearly valuable to him; it only becomes clear at the film’s close that what the protagonist has been pursuing with such violent single-mindedness is the body of his dog, the loss of which simultaneously signifies the loss of his last meaningful relationship as well as a broader and more profound loss of faith in any sense of kinship. This pursuit of what was lost is mapped onto his relationship with Rey (Robert Pattinson), the younger brother of one of the car thieves, whom he kidnaps and forces to lead him along endless highways through alternatingly bleak and sublime landscapes. Along the way Rey shifts from enemy to vulnerable mentee to compatriot as they both encounter and reproduce the social decline and moral depravity of their dystopian surroundings. The film is a deftly written, deeply philosophical and moral meditation on modern life. Nonetheless, it has been largely rejected or at best wildly underappreciated by critics, often being painted as a mere brutal spectacle and nihilistic indulgence.

Despite obvious connections with earlier Australian outback dystopias with cars, it is also fruitful to place The Rover into dialogue with Australian films like Wake in Fright (Kotcheff Australia 1971) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir Australia 1975), as well as more recent films like The Proposition (Hillcoat Australia 2005) and Van Diemen’s Land (auf der Heide Australia 2009). Such films, in the vein of what has been called the outback gothic, perhaps more closely embody the aesthetic and strike closer to the heart of the themes The Rover concerns itself with. The outback gothic utilises elements of horror and existential uncertainty to engage the contradictions within modern bourgeois culture, the savagery at the heart of the civilising project of modern capitalism, and the precarious and permeable boundaries between nature and culture. The juxtaposition of civil hospitality with the horror of pointless kangaroo killings in Wake in Fright – killings which call into question the ‘humanity’ of humans as distinct from and superior to the animal – is inverted in The Rover to even greater effect. In The Rover it is our inhumanity towards humankind – seen in the protagonist’s general disrespect for human life and relationships – that is measured against the potential offered by our dearly held relationships with animals, evinced in the protagonist’s incongruously deep emotional connection with dogs throughout the film.

The Rover implicitly explores the assumed fact that rational self-interest and conflict are ‘natural’ ontological constants, a part of ‘human nature’, examining the results of such morally compromising assumptions and their coproduction in latest capitalism. The fact that critics have characterised the film variously as thematically nihilistic, pointless and needlessly violent is confounding, given that its point is made pretty overt. It is clearly a film about capitalism in a time when security and risk have come to define markets and human interaction in general. The exchange between the shopkeeper and the protagonist – in which the protagonist is forced to buy something before being pointed in the direction of dearly needed medical attention – illustrates the manner in which capital facilitates self...