The Square

This is one of the best films that I have seen in a long time. Joel Edgerton is clearly an amazing talent as he writes and features in this highly unusual version of a somewhat common plot line. The story is full of twists and turns and really keeps you enthralled to the very end. There are high quality Australian actors in this film, who work together to produce some terrific scenes, that are realistic , dramatic and entertaining. The only disappointment was we were one of about five people in the audience. Considering it was a Saturday night and the The Square's first week at the cinemas, I felt very sad for the Edgerton brothers and also worried that if fantastic Aussie films like this one aren't drawing audiences, then what will? Australians need to get behind Australian film, particularly when it is this good.

"The Square" opens with two parked cars at a scenic overlook. In one of them, two agitated dogs observe the other vehicle where their respective owners, Ray and Carla, are engaged in some steamy extra-marital gymnastics. When Carla returns home, she spots her rough diamond husband hiding a bag of cash in the ceiling of their washroom. She decides to steal it and run off with her lover to begin a new life together. Construction site manager Ray declines to go along with her scheme at first, anticipating the fallout will foul up his sweet workplace kickback scam, but Carla's charms prove too tempting. The lovers hire themselves a dubious partner, lash together a creaky plan and set it in motion, only to meet with a firestorm of foul-ups, suspicion and terror.

"The Square" shares several themes with "Body Heat" and "Blood Simple" - the chief differences being its gritty realism and fast pacing. It also boasts a fine array of support roles which provide numerous possibilities for misunderstandings and betrayal among the various conspirators, victims and bystanders as their lives spiral out of control. By the time the dust has cleared at the conclusion, it seems the phrase 'ratcheting up the tension' might have been coined for 'The Square'. Nash Edgerton directs his brother Joel's tight script, extracting intense, believable performances from his actors. It all adds up to an impressive modern Indie film noir.

The action in The Square takes place in a small Australian town, a town so small that everyone knows everyone at least casually, and when a party is arranged most of the residents are invited.

Two of these residents are middle aged construction foreman Ray (David Roberts) and a hairdresser in her early 20s named Carla (Claire van der Boom – an awesome stripper name if there ever was one!). Ray and Carla are married… but not to each other.

Things start going wrong early, but on a smaller scale. Ray and Carla intend to leave their respective spouses and skip town, but first they need cash. To come up with the cash they each come up with a plan, Ray cuts a side deal with a shonky contractor, and Carla's plan involves theft and just a pinch of arson.

"It's not like anyone will get hurt", she reasons. How wrong she is.

The Square is as dark as films come, everyone in the film is varying degrees of shonky otherwise they don't get any lines. No room for the honest here Mate. But this is a decidedly non-Hollywood noir, the protagonists aren't gangsters or hit men or criminal geniuses, they are tow-truck drivers, hairdressers and local slobs.

As the ever growing bodycount envelops both the innocent and the not so… more and more are intertwined in an ever more complex story that should have begun and ended with Ray and Carla skipping town. Alas once the paranoia, mistrust and guilt leads to cover up, murder and betrayal no-one in The Square is destined for a happy ending.

As a viewer I kept thinking "Now how are you gonna get out of this?" and "Don't do that you dickhead", but the actions of those involved never stray into cartoon or the illogical – at least to them. It might take a leap of faith to pretend all the events in the film happen over a short time frame, but it isn't beyond the stretch of the imagination to think most of this stuff could happen.

I just hope it never happens near me.

Final Rating – 6 / 10. An effective and intricately drawn drama that will keep you guessing and involved until the very end, even once you realise there cannot possibly be a happy outcome.

I really enjoyed this overlooked Aussie flick because it less than predictably shows you that no matter how carefully you plan something and whittle it down to it's simplest form, the universe is chaotic and the butterfly effect can put the screws to your carefully built house of card. And yes, the whole plot here is a house of cards with one lie covering up another and another until the two characters spiral downwards into a chasm of self destruction and loss of control. For our two cheating main characters, it gets a little Kafkaesque as the circle of poison and snowballing of deceit begins to collapse in on itself and destroys everyone around them. This story has been done before but I thought The Square did a good job of telling it from yet another angle.

What would be a fun find on cable one night isn't worth a trip to the theater. An expertly plotted story (with a particularly clever blackmail subplot) suffers from uninspired casting in the male lead. This actor embodies the film's fatal flaw: an almost total lack of humor.

Film noir is necessarily a downer genre but think how funny Body Heat and Chinatown are with their clever protagonists (and Chandler always has you laughing). The Square, however, features morose David Roberts who should be dancing with joy from his affair with the much younger, cuter, livelier Claire van der Bloom. But he's conflicted from the get-go and the director never lets us see what drew these two together in the first place. There's little chemistry between them and a few scenes between two dogs hold more joy than anything between the impassionate human lovers. The most interesting male actor is co-writer Joel Edgerton and the story might have had more sizzle if he'd been the lead.

But the plot does indeed generate some real tension and the film is watchable. Bodies pile up unexpectedly, there's a mystery inside a mystery with the strong subplot and the ending holds real surprises. The script works but the director, through his casting and tone choices, lets it and us down.