“Limbo” joins a long line of fine Australian films taking to the desert to disinter racial trauma, to rebury the bones with more care and awareness, but also enduring fury.Do you have a deep appreciation for captivating comedy dramas? Are you the type to watch the characters closely, immerse yourself in their journey, and relate with them? If you answered with a resounding yes, you’d love In Limbo, an upcoming comedy-drama series. Sturdy and still, becoming one with his aridly dejected surroundings, he tensely waits for any break in the silence, knowing his complicity in echoed history. How can Travis hope to make a dent here? Baker’s grainily compelling performance carries “Limbo,” however, by leaning into that futility. The visual language of film noir tends to give the truth a place to hide here, caverns of shadow deliver the goods, but there’s just as much to uncover in broad, punishing daylight: Many shots stress the high, wide sky and dusty sprawl of scrub surrounding this town of tragedy, where individual lives are rendered puny and throwaway against the elements. This degree of control yields less a sense of indulgence, however, than of crisp, exacting discipline - best demonstrated in the director’s clean, spartan but mood-drenched black-and-white lensing, in which no empty space feels emotionally uncharged. Every mineral seems to have long ago been mined from the place locals must live on the dirt that remains.Ī virtual one-man band as a filmmaker, writer-director Sen also takes sole credit for cinematography, editing, music (sparse) and visual effects (sparser still). Here, many buildings are carved into the rocks or underground - production designer Adam Head makes much of the sparse, grotto-like menace of Travis’ fleapit motel - while local caves hold burnt-out secrets, invisible in the striking aerial shots that present Limbo as little more than a lunar quilt of craters and sand swirls. And so he goes exploring its crevices, permitting Sen ample space and time to burrow into the geographic and atmospheric curiosities of this eerie, wind-licked landscape. She’s intrigued, however, by this gruff stranger who seems to carry his own burden of sorrow, and they build a tentative, not-quite-romantic rapport, beautifully played by Baker and Wanganeen with a mutually watchful reserve that haltingly cracks into vulnerable candor.Ĭar trouble, meanwhile, compels Travis to extend this seemingly hopeless case review, temporarily swapping his executive sedan for a wide, rusty Dodge that sets him to the whole town’s rhythm of slowed decay. A single mother making a modest living at the local diner, she’s also assumed care of Charlie’s two children, and life in the present tense is hard enough without dredging up the past.
His world-weary sister Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) is less hostile, but still skeptical that reopening this wound will amount to much.
The victim’s brother Charlie (an excellent Rob Collins) regards Travis with particularly cold wariness: Charlotte’s murder, it appears, is one of many familial and cultural losses that has set his life forever off-track. Small wonder that those in Limbo who remember the fiasco are loath to talk when another pale out-of-towner comes sniffing around.
The investigation, we learn, was slack and skimpy, disproportionately and aggressively focused on Indigenous men as suspects. He carries out his cold case review with a quiet sense of duty and a tacit hint of shame, mindful of the fact that white policemen decades before him didn’t exactly exercise all due diligence in probing the disappearance and murder of a young Indigenous girl, Charlotte Hayes. (He does indeed have a private, lingering heroin habit.)īut Travis isn’t a thug, exactly. Played by a craggy, buzz-cut Simon Baker - initially near-unrecognizable and never better - with an air of exhaustion that meets its match in this depleted opal-mining community, he exudes more rogue menace than institutional authority: One child remarks that he looks like a drug dealer, not a cop.
He does have a name, as it happens: Travis Hurley, a hardened police detective blown in from far away to investigate a 20-year-old murder in the bare, desolate and fictitious town of Limbo in South Australia. Admittedly, with his straight-cut jeans, Western shirt and silvery belt buckle that could take a man’s eye out, “Limbo’s” taciturn hero seems less like a suave gumshoe than he does a cowboy, a surly, crusading Man With No Name.
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