Director Rowan Woods and his collaborators have crafted a totally absorbing urban drama about complex homosapiens whose lives have been compromised by drugs and various addictions.
Cate Blanchett is Tracy, the film's lynch-pin, a Western suburbs girl whose ambitions to get ahead are thwarted by financial and personal skeletons from her past.
Scribe Jacqueline Perske manipulates a tangled web of characters ranging from Sam Neil's retiring drug baron Brad to Hugo Weaving's failed yuppie junkie Lionel. Noni Hazlehurst, in a riveting performance, plays family matriarch Janelle, a woman so crippled by regret and betrayal, she can hardly stand upright.
The tone is a few degrees lighter than Woods' brilliant "The Boys" and the Cabramatta milieu is broader, but this is still a beautifully balanced character piece with top notch performances and a restrained third act that avoids the usual clichés.
Supporting turns by Susie Porter (as Jenny) and Joel Tobeck (as Moss) are exceptional.
Though some climactic clarity might have been helpful, this is, nevertheless, emotionally graphic and pictorially intense cinema.
