Year:  2023

Director:  Mark Leonard Winter

Rated:  MA

Release:  22 February 2024

Distributor: Bonsai

Running time: 101 minutes

Worth: $10.00
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Cast:
Hugo Weaving, Phoenix Raei, Rhys Mitchell, John Waters, Robert Menzies

Intro:
… despite the gorgeous backdrops and Weaving’s off-kilter performance, The Rooster feels like it’s treading old ground when it comes to dissecting the male ego.

The Rooster is the directorial debut of actor Mark Leonard Winter, which tackles overly familiar tropes of masculinity, loneliness, and grief.

Set in rural Australia, Phoenix Raei plays Dan, a cop who spends his nights cozying up to bad dreams of suicide and his mornings fighting with his rooster, who would rather attack him than eat. When his friend, Steve (Rhys Mitchell), is found wandering naked in a playground, Dan turns to Steve’s family for support. However, the day takes a horrific turn and Dan later finds Steve dead in a shallow grave in the woods.

Ostensibly, this sounds like the set-up to a sunburnt murder mystery by way of The Dry or Mystery Road. Instead, Winter pushes Steve’s death to the background and uses it to bring Dan in collision with Hugo Weaving’s domineering unnamed hermit. Searching for clues or meaning to Steve’s demise amongst the trees, Dan instead finds the hermit bathing and listening to jazz in a rundown shack. Waving his shotgun at Dan and loudly proclaiming the forest to be his, the hermit backs down when he realises that he can get booze out of the fledgling cop.

Like a broody and wine-soaked Hunt for the Wilderpeople, these two men from wildly different lifestyles are ironically brought together through their need to be left alone.

Weaving is clearly the centrepiece of the film as he spits and snarls at what he sees as an unforgiving world. It’s fair to say that the whole mood of the piece changes once the hermit enters the room – or, to be more blunt, runs half-naked out of a hut. Made of equal parts sadness and unbridled rage, the hermit is the personification of a hurricane. If you only watch one movie where Agent Smith urinates on a crucifix, then let The Rooster scratch that itch.

That, unfortunately, leaves Raei with little to do once he crosses paths with Weaving. His restrained performance of grief is drowned out by Weaving cock-a-doodling into the heavens. As a character, Dan feels nebulous and comes across as someone for the hermit to bounce off. And sure, this is deliberate. Dan is literally running away from his emotions around Steve, burying them as far as he can. The hermit, meanwhile, is loud and brash, playing experimental jazz and robbing camps. He knows who is. Obviously, neither way is shown to be healthy in processing complicated thoughts, and so the narrative shows the two men beginning to learn from each other.

It’s a shame then that, despite the gorgeous backdrops and Weaving’s off-kilter performance, The Rooster feels like it’s treading old ground when it comes to dissecting the male ego. There’s nudity, chest beating and even the inevitable drunken confessional. As Winter comes to the end of his story, he shakes up what we think we know about the hermit with a third-act twist that you wish had come earlier. If only, to give more meat to Dan’s narrative.

While it’s not the bold new exploration of men that it could have been, The Rooster will certainly be remembered for an unleashed Weaving tearing through the woods like a bulldozer.

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