Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Josh McConville, Hugo Weaving, Diana Glenn
Intro:
... a keenly intelligent and deeply complex emotional thriller that will spark conversations aplenty.
An adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent set in contemporary Melbourne? At first, this might seem like a major stretch, an oddball take on a classic akin to something like, say, Michael Almereyda’s 2000 version of Hamlet with Ethan Hawke. But under the sure, deeply idiosyncratic hand of writer/director Jonathan Ogilvie (whose little-seen 2008 crime drama The Tender Hook played daringly with form, genre and storytelling), the retitled Lone Wolf somehow manages to remain faithful to the source material while also contemporising it and bending it and reshaping it into something wholly new.
Winnie (a superbly brittle but powerful turn from Tilda Cobham-Hervey) co-runs an anarchist bookshop in inner city Melbourne and looks after her brother Stevie (the movie-stealing Chris Bunton, who was unforgettable in the short Kairos), who was born with Down Syndrome. But thanks to her duplicitous boyfriend Conrad (typically brilliant Josh McConville on top form), Winnie and her brother are drawn into a terrorist bombing plot. Through the snaking plot, Winnie is also romantically pursued by Ossipon (singer Marlon Williams is very impressive), one of Conrad’s fellow anarchists. The whole sad trajectory, meanwhile, is collected via surveillance footage by determined ex-cop Kylie Heat (Diana Glenn), and presented to Hugo Weaving’s imperious minister for his appraisal.
Though the film’s stylistic conceit – it is made entirely of complexly captured surveillance footage – would suggest a lack of intimacy or something gimmicky, Lone Wolf is actually emotionally compelling, particularly in its depiction of the heart-warming relationship between Winnie and Stevie, and the far more fraught one between Winnie and Conrad. The film’s drive toward something tragic is also inexorable in its quiet power; we know it’s going somewhere bad, and Ogilvie mines this sense of grim unease for all its worth. There’s richness and topicality to be found in the film’s political machinations, but it’s in the relationships that Lone Wolf really grips. It’s an exercise in high cinematic style from Jonathan Ogilvie, but it’s also a soul-shaking treatise on how decent, everyday people can be broken on the wheel of political struggle, even while finding empowerment through it. Lone Wolf is a keenly intelligent and deeply complex emotional thriller that will spark conversations aplenty.
