Jindabyne DVD Review

After a harrowing opening which nearly seems fit for a horror movie, a great deal of effort is spent to show Jindabyne, Australia as a peaceful and gloriously beautiful place. So peaceful in fact, that there is immediately something unsettling about such a serene environment, shown in the opening sequence when a young woman is accosted on a road stretching miles in each direction. The beauty in the surroundings of the town becomes the source of fear, as the vast landscapes also represent a great deal of solitude. The lake now covers the old town, a place where many now fish occasionally dragging up odd bits and pieces from the submerged city. Jindabyne is a powerful film about the effects of a murder in a small town, but it is more specifically about these individual characters. Moments are misspent creating an eerie existence of the kind of creature who would kill when the film is really about the way it affects the men who found her and the women who love them.

Thankfully the audience is spared the actual acts of atrocity that this particular man carries out on the unfortunate young woman, but we are able to see him callously toss the used corpse into a river deep in the heart of the wilderness. This just happens to be the spot that Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and his three lifelong friends go on an annual fishing trip together. On the evening before departing, the friends and their wives gather for a traditional dinner and conversation. Jolly celebration and photographs of the happy friends is only slightly disturbed by the reminder that two of their children, including Stewart’s son, have become enthralled by death. The next morning the four men set out on their journey, only to find the corpse of the poor woman on their first evening out. Unable to help the dead woman they debate the best way to leave her until their return, finally agreeing to tie her body and leave it in the water before continuing on their fishing trip. It only takes one large fish to be caught and the men all seem to forget about the girl until their return.

Even though they return after a day because the guilt starts to eat at one of them, the truth soon begins to come out that the men had waited a day to report the murder. By Monday morning the whole town has gotten word that the murder was discovered on Friday, and they are all looking to the men with no murderer to blame. Accused of destroying evidence and being callous, Stewart’s relationship with his wife is only further damaged by the fact that he doesn’t even tell her when he returns on Sunday night. With the discovery that she may be pregnant again Claire begins treating Stewart with disdain long before his error in judgment. In this way it almost seems as though she is merely looking for a way out, or an excuse to be mad at him, when she seemed to resent him regardless. So when he and his friends give her cause to question their marriage, slowly things begin to unravel.

The DVD has some deleted scenes and a generic, yet often quite satisfying, making-of featurette.