by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Tal Davida, Nick Drummond, Nicole Hamblin-Walker
Intro:
… exacting and believable, watching it can feel like you’re involved in an emphatically unhealthy situation.
Might want to buckle up for this one.
Aphelion, the feature directing debut of Steve Willems, is a story of domestic abuse. Of using people. Of aggressive control oozing into every crack of a person’s being like sickly black gunge. It’s the kind of film that isn’t designed to be ‘enjoyed’ in the traditional sense. It’s a film to be endured.
So, it helps that the film itself is worth enduring.
The film is staged like a play, with a singular setting and revolving around two main characters: Zinaida (Tal Davida) and her abusive partner Caleb (Nick Drummond). There are a handful of voices and other physical presences that enter and exit throughout, but the main drive, the main terror, comes from these two.
Starting out in bright, saturated colours as Zinaida wakes up from the night before, a conversation with Lexi (Nicole Hamblin-Walker) both textually and visually shows the cycle that she is trapped in. All that warmth gradually fades like afterglow, into stark and scratchy monochrome, as Zinaida’s talks of affection for Caleb turn tragic and sinister.
Between the striking use of colour and AJ Stewart’s itchy and foreboding soundtrack, there’s enough here to differentiate from just being theatre on film. But it’s in the writing and performances that the gut rot spreads from; Davida’s erratic flips between fawning, outrage, and fleeting moments of actual contentment, and Drummond’s domineering physical presence and harrowing efficacy with the various forms of social control that he enforces on her. The vocabulary of abuse here is so broad, it says something when actual physical harm manages to be one of the least depressing things.
As crushing as this is to sit through, with all myriad of wishes for some form of sharpened implement to make its way to Caleb as recompense for any one thing that he does, let alone all of them at once… it’s the deeper truth that is somehow even more unsettling. Punctuated by Lexi’s initial pleas for Zinaida to “just leave him”, the film goes to great lengths (arguably too great, like with the presentation of literal prostitution) to show how difficult that step truly is. How the extent of his grip, through drugs, sex, money, and food, has her locked in place, knowing how terrible this all is… but unable to conceive of a reality beyond those four walls. A hell that feels like one’s only option.
It is somewhat refreshing that, along with its frankness about just how awful Zinaida’s headspace is as a result of all this, the film also takes time out to properly dress down Caleb. Not just for how he treats her, but also how thin that veneer of total control truly is in presence of other men. That commanding attitude gives way to his own pleading, his own parasitic attachment to others, his own dependence. For as much as he instils the idea that she cannot exist without him, he himself clearly cannot exist without someone to feed on. So much pain, so much scarring on and beneath the flesh, all caused by such a little prick.
Aphelion’s approach to detailing the social mechanics of an abusive relationship is so exacting and believable, watching it can feel like you’re involved in an emphatically unhealthy situation. It doesn’t appeal to fantasies, the kind of movie magic that exacts vengeance on those who harm others, and instead presents the raw uncut; the reality of living this. The takeaway is that armchair remarks such as “why don’t you just leave?”, as well-intended as they may be, fly in the face of the physical and psychological chains binding those at the brunt of it. It’s about the strength it takes to say no, and the weakness it takes to demand yes.
Aphelion screens every Friday from 20 February to 20 March at the Piccadilly Theatre in Adelaide.
