★★★☆
Australian filmmakers rarely want to be seen as such – they dream of being taken seriously by the ‘real’ cinema industry of America, and it robs them of a cultural identity. Despite this statelessness, and despite outward pretension, Boys In The Trees delivers a gut-punch emotional narrative with plenty of style.
Corey (Toby Wallace) is on the cusp of graduation, planning to ditch his small town and his wild boy mates for study overseas. After being involved in the humiliation of bullying target Jonah (Gulliver McGrath), Corey agrees to walk him home, and in doing so agrees to play a game they once played as children, a game that becomes increasingly frightening.
Writer/director Nicholas Verso cleaves closely to Hollywood tradition, invoking all the cult films and Halloween aesthetics that defined the American ’90s. The film is Aussie in accent alone. It’s all shortcut – with this one choice, Verso establishes his gothic leanings, deep nostalgia and a clear-cut cinematic language, if a lazy one.
And yet, familiarity serves the story well. Boys In The Trees is a treasure trove of deep cuts and old wounds, lifting wholesale from the soundtrack of angry ’90s adolescence – Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Garbage. If you grew up in a country town, you knew a Romany (Mitzi Ruhlmann). As the malicious Jango (Justin Holborow) and his grommets trash the town, they’re captured as if in a music video. We bear witness to the fantasies that play out in their minds.
Fantasy is core to Verso’s narrative, as it struggles to obfuscate the very real traumas that Corey and Jonah share. Rarely is this subtle; the game the pair play is called ‘cocytus’, an invocation of Dante’s ninth circle of hell, reserved for traitors. Think Día de Muertos rituals and an Aboriginal elder dressed like Papa Legba, for that extra slice of cognitive dissonance. Boys walks a fine line between acknowledging the obvious and pacing out revelation, and it often stumbles, much as the actors do over Verso’s heightened prose.
But as the masks fall to the floor, and aesthetic distractions are cast aside, the film draws a concealed blade and thrusts at the heart. Under all the sound and fury of Jango’s rampaging, beyond the enacting of toxic male rituals and high school cruelties, we see the horrid life Jonah has had thrust upon him. The film is about more than bullying, betrayal and loss – it is about those who are forgotten, the boys in the trees not fond memories but ephemeral beings. One of the few things Verso treats with subtlety is sexuality, and it casts a long shadow.
The creator’s cultural posturing often gets in the way, but cannot undercut the powerful, resonant narrative he has crafted. Boys In The Trees is fake blood splashed over scar tissue; face paint dripping like tears.
Boys In The Treesopens in cinemas on Thursday October 20.
