With a face like a serrated blade and a pair of fierce, beady eyes, it's not hard to see why Sean Harris has often been cast as villains of various stripes – in the last couple of Mission: Impossible films, for instance, as well as on TV shows such as Southcliffe and The Borgias.
In Thomas M. Wright's The Stranger – the second film by the Australian actor-turned-director following his auspicious 2018 debut, Acute Misfortune – Harris appears so gaunt as to seem ghoulish, his hard-bitten features made more prominent by the fact of his long, greasy grey locks being pulled back into a ponytail. His countenance slides between slack-jawed and alert, suspicious and vulnerable, with an unnerving unpredictability; his voice a lean rasp.
He's leaned in so hard that viewers may recoil – if they can take their eyes away, that is.
It's these conflicting impulses – to shrink from; to stare at – that characterise the cultural obsession with true crime, made prominent by a recent proliferation of podcasts and documentaries dedicated to the genre (although, as Truman Capote or indeed any 19th-century newsie would attest, it's hardly a new phenomenon).
Though the people involved have been fictionalised (rather than impersonated) and their names changed, The Stranger takes as its basis one of the most notorious crimes in Australian history, being the 2003 abduction, sexual assault, and murder of 13-year-old Sunshine Coast boy Daniel Morcombe.
The highly publicised case remained unsolved until 2011, when an elaborate undercover sting operation yielded a confession from Brett Peter Cowan, leading to the recovery of some of Morcombe's bones and items of clothing from a muddy clearing near the Glass House Mountains and, eventually, in 2014, the unrepentant killer's conviction.
And yet, as Henry Teague – Cowan's cinematic counterpart – the most explicitly violent thing Harris is shown doing is firing off a bunch of imaginary rounds from an unloaded gun; his way of expressing pleasure at having been cut into an arms deal.
Far more sinister is Henry's dancing: arms outstretched, palms open and eyes straight ahead, in thrall to the opening bars of Icehouse's Trojan Blue. He's seemingly entreating the man he believes to be his new friend and underworld patron – played by Joel Edgerton (The Green Knight), who also produced the film – to do… something, though it's discomfortingly unclear what. "I don't really listen to music," Edgerton's character tells Henry stiffly, seeking to curtail their interaction.
Though Teague's crime – Cowan's crime – underwrites The Stranger, it is not actually depicted, nor are the victims. The boy, here named James Liston, and his family members, remain unseen; unheard from.
In its dredging up of a sordid national tragedy and in its framing, Wright's film echoes Nitram, Justin Kurzel's portrait of Martin Bryant, the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre, which strategically skirts the use of his name and cuts off at the moment of impending violence. (Kurzel's film nevertheless attracted controversy; The Stranger too, on a smaller scale.)
But Wright's film, which primarily draws from journalist Kate Kyriacou's 2015 book about the operation that led to Cowan's arrest (titled The Sting), is closer in structure and intent to films such as Destroyer (Karyn Kusama, 2018) and Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986): procedurals that bear witness to the deleterious effects any intensive police investigation is bound to have on the lives and very identities of those involved; to the awful price of staring into a particular kind of abyss.
The Stranger pivots on the relationship between Henry, the suspect, and Edgerton's Mark, the undercover cop tasked with bringing the alleged pedophile/murderer into the fold of an entirely fictional band of crims, gradually building trust so as to be able, one day, to extract a confession.
"You have to weigh the balance of the closeness you can form with him against your own vulnerability," Mark's boss (Matthew Sunderland) cautions him – but behind the all-black speed-dealers that the in-character Mark sports is a thousand-yard stare that suggests he's waded in too deep already.
Even at home, it's clear from the way his temper flares when his young son (played by Wright's own son, Cormac) ventures out of the house during a game of hide-and-seek that the case is never far from his mind.
Inter-cut with Mark and Henry's courtship is the more bread-and-butter police work being done by a pair of detectives assigned to the case (played by Jada Alberts and Fletcher Humphrys), long gone cold but reopened in the wake of a coronial inquest. Their findings provide the grounds for the ensuing sting.
With its course clearly charted for Henry's arrest, The Stranger feels both more conventional and less exploitative than Nitram – a film that, at least in the experience of this writer, was suffused with the gawping condescension of a freak-show.
But Wright is undoubtedly working in the same grim idiom that has occupied Kurzel since his grizzly 2011 feature debut, Snowtown: the latent violence of the Australian landscape, as channelled by damaged men living on the fringes, terribly fragile and just as explosive, and intuitively drawn to destruction as a medium for self-expression.
That Wright cast Snowtown's Daniel Henshall as one of the two leads in Acute Misfortune signalled as much – in both films, Henshall plays a svengali of sorts to a younger man, cultivating a fractious co-dependence that plays out along the lines of a potentially lethal game of chicken.
The dynamic between Henry and Mark can be plotted along similar lines, and it's their storyline that gets drawn with the greatest care, coloured by brooding stylistic touches – the ominous womps of Oliver Coates's score; the hard cuts that terminate certain scenes, interrupting the dialogue – while the two detectives are left to conduct their expository busy work in relative anonymity, and without fanfare.
And who can blame Wright for being more interested in these tortured men than in what can be boiled down to a Law & Order episode? That The Stranger had its premiere at Cannes earlier this year (in the Un Certain Regard section), following on from Nitram being given a competition slot the year before, also points to an international fascination with this dimension of our country's character.
From Chopper to Wolf Creek, Animal Kingdom to Snowtown, real-life violence has been the spark behind some of the most notable recent works of Australian cinema – in line with a self-flagellating, gothic tradition that goes back to the New Wave, with classics such as Wake in Fright and Mad Max.
While The Stranger makes a solid case for itself as a meditation on certain modes of gruff, rough-hewn masculinity, one may well ask: haven't we done our time?
The Stranger is in cinemas now and streams on Netflix from October 19.
