Limbo * * *

 I wasn't as impressed by this film as I wanted to be.  

It's written and directed by Ivan Sen, the director who gave us Goldstone

Once again we've got a cop who is unusual, to the point of totally unlikely, turning up in some God-forsaken outback town. 

Digging for a gem of a lead
in an old mining town

Played by Simon Baker, Travis Hurley is a cop who is tattooed, chain smoking and heroin using. He used to be with the drug squad so I guess that explains it.  He listens to bible lessons  in his car, and looks uncannily like Walter White from the TV Series Breaking Bad.

He's been sent up to look at a cold-case.  A girl went missing from the town twenty years ago. Like most of the population she was aboriginal.  After a couple of days he's trying to figure out if no one is talking to him because they're hiding something, or because he's a white cop. 

He's got an old-school tape recorder on which he listens to the original recordings of the interviews from twenty years ago.  (Why they couldn't have just given him a digitalized file is never answered). Still, like his many tattoos, it's a colorful prop along with his 1960's Dodge Phoenix which is lent to him when his own car breaks down.

Umoona was an opal mining town but it's supply is now exhausted, so now it looks like the surface of the  moon: full of craters. There's a message there too with white man scarring the land for its treasures then walking away from it.  It's shot in Black and White and looks quite good for that, giving emphasis to the barren landscape. Like a few of those legendary opal mining towns, people live in the holes they have dug, as it's cooler in summer. Even the Limbo Motel where he stays is modeled from a man made cave. 

Travis cracks a lead with Charlie, the missing girls brother. Charlie is an embittered loner living in a caravan on the outside of town. He slowly opens up along with his estranged sister Emma and pieces start to come together, but it's mighty slow.  At least I thought so. Some stories are told by the locals and he meets Jacob which is rather symbolic, especially after the bible recordings he has been listening to on the prophet Jacob.

The real resolution comes not so much as the unveiling of the truth behind the missing girl as the reunification of a family, giving Travis gets some satisfaction at the end. I just wished I shared the feeling.