Film
Thought I was dreaming
by Philip Matthews
The terrible beauty of Out of the Blue.
Out of the Blue is a restrained film about a mass killing in a small community and that restraint means that it often plays out in miniature: one scene standing in for many, one person representing several, a gesture or a look summing up an entire person. It’s a kind of minimalism that is probably a result of budgetary necessity, but has been turned into an aesthetic advantage: as shot in Aramoana and Long Beach by Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser, the film is effortlessly beautiful and unnervingly quiet, and all of the actors seem to be completely at home in their characters. No one really stars here – not Matt Sunderland as killer David Gray, not Karl Urban as quietly heroic cop Nick Harvey – but the acting is uniformly excellent, and not just from them and Tandi Wright, William Kircher and Simon Ferry, from whom you might expect good acting, but from such perfectly cast unknowns as Lois Lawn, Georgina Fabish and Fayth Rasmussen, with the last two playing kids who lose parents.
A natural comparison for this kind of story might be the Gus Van Sant film inspired by the Columbine killings, Elephant. That film took a poetic, time-bending approach to the subject, while also immersing us deep within the perspective of those experiencing the tragedy: from nowhere, without any fanfare or warning, here come the killers. But in a way, Van Sant’s job was easier than that of Out of the Blue’s writers Robert Sarkies and Graeme Tetley: as horrific as it is, at a deep level most of us can understand the impulses behind high-school killings; there’s some atavistic memory of bullying or humiliation. It’s much, much harder to understand or explain what Gray did. Sarkies and Tetley don’t really try, but what is touching about Out of the Blue – it’s perhaps the saddest thing about this sad film – is the pity that they seem to express for Gray. It’s there in two passing moments.
One comes near the end, when Gray is finally caught and shot by the Anti-Terrorist Squad, and he’s on the ground, tied up like a pig and shrieking, and the Anti-Terrorist Squad guys look at each other and light up cigarettes, like hunters celebrating a kill. The other comes earlier, when Gray is hiding out in an empty crib in the middle of the night. He unpacks a radio and flicks between stations. None of us could have any idea what Gray chose to listen to – maybe he wanted to know what they were saying about him on talkback? Maybe he soothed his nerves with classical music? – but Sarkies has imagined that the Chills song “Pink Frost” played on the radio as Gray listened and he has sneaked a second or two into the film. It’s hauntingly apt. The Chills song came from a dream that singer Martin Phillipps had about killing, and his guilt and terror on waking might match the feelings Gray had at the time, when he stopped to reflect or when the full horror of Aramoana dawned on him: “How can I live when you see what I’ve done?”
OUT OF THE BLUE, directed by Robert SarkiesCul
