Save your money for something good and enjoyable

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

What a horrible movie despite some big name actors being in it ! Waste of time , predictable and just hard to even keep interested in this boring and incoherent trash ! I am going to avoid Australian movies this is the third bad one I have watched I don't think they made a good movie in Australia since road warrior :) anyway they are a sharp contrast to Norway which the last several films I saw from Norway and a series were excellent ! Australia you are on movie probation !

The Parkers move to a remote Australian desert town. Matthew (Joseph Fiennes) is a pharmacist and has a struggling marriage with Catherine (Nicole Kidman). They moved after their promiscuous underage daughter Lily had an affair with her teacher and Matthew beat him up. Lily continues to be sexually loose in the new town hanging out with the skaters. Their son Tommy sleepwalks and Lily follows him out into the night. The next day, Catherine discovers that neither of them have been going to school and both are missing. A sand storm strikes. They go to the local sheriff David Rae (Hugo Weaving). The family's dysfunction and the town's darker sides are slowly revealed.I can understand all the hate. This movie starts promising some kind of mystery but it slowly switches to something different. The weirdness starts with Catherine aggressively initiating sex while her children is missing. It is really off-putting until I quickly realized that this movie is about Catherine who is borderline. Matthew is at times her enabler and has his own volatile issues. Lily's wild nature has an origin and their troubles started well before the events of this movie. This does continue with the mystery of the disappearances but this isn't solely about that. The tone is atmospheric and off-kilter. My biggest problem for me is that the movie is too ambitious. There are lots of side characters but I find them all fascinating. It's a strange movie but I like its ambitious differentness.

Although unspoken it seems clear that Nicole Kidman's character is a sex and love addict. Her husband, Joseph Fiennes, is so repressed and full of rage (as sometimes happens to the partners of addicts). The teen daughter clearly follows in mom's footsteps adding to the father's sense of helplessness and rage. When the children disappear you see Kidman's character struggle with grief, denial, depression, and a complete mental break. From a mental health and addiction standpoint, this movie is great. But from a general movie escapism perspective it is slow moving and tedious. Yes, the movie is slow and painstaking. Just like the lives of addicts.

I almost never review movies and I often like a tidy ending, but what intrigued me about this movie is that after scouring reviews, there were none I could find that touched on what I felt stood about about this storyline. Even a director-interview touched only on how different characters dealt with grief in the movie.Sure there was a lot of grief going around, but much more interesting was the element of a teenage female sociopath. The character of Lily went beyond simple promiscuity. She upended her former teacher's life. Was not only adept at seducing men at an early age, but also chronicled her conquests in her diary in an explicit way that clearly points to sociopathy.Parallels are drawn between her mother's need for sexual attention and manipulation with her own. The fact that she didn't take care of her brother and may have willingly abandoned him suggests something even more sinister. Particularly the haunting refrain of being touched in the dark. She gives us no reason to believe that she looks out for her younger brother, given that she will disappear into the box with him standing by helplessly. It is part of her power over him that she can do this without fear of reprisal from him. Ask how she manages to pull all this over on him and her parents?I came to the conclusion that she had abused her younger brother in some way, exerting her control over him in the darkness 'when no one can see.' Getting him to 'touch her' and do her bidding. Why else would a healthy boy not be able to sleep and instead wander aimlessly in the night? Why does she go after him, and why does she as the older, responsible one let it go so far as to allow him to almost meet his demise?Her father sensed it intuitively, which was why he feared for her early on and either reacted violently to protect her, or felt she deserved to be punished. Only a pretty screwed up girl would act out so extremely at such a young age. The father also recognized narcissistic tendencies in his wife. Perhaps the mother had a male relative who abused her in the past and there could have been a continuation of that with Lily as a child that was not overtly suggested.The mother's downward spiral toward the end also reinforced that notion as her daughter's disappearance reignited buried psychological trauma that plays out in a psychotic break for her which is witnessed by the townspeople. I felt the movie overall was well-acted by all involved and well-directed. Kudos to the independent film!