BFI Recommends: Mystery Road

A gripping procedural thriller set in the Australian outback is our staff recommendation of the day: Mystery Road is chosen by Simon Duffy.

19 June 2020

By Simon Duffy

Mystery Road (2013)

Ivan Sen’s gripping slow-burn crime thriller, Mystery Road (2013), plays out like a neo-western as it smartly navigates the economic and racial divides at play in contemporary Australia. When a truck driver finds the body of a teenage girl under a road in rural Queensland, newly promoted Detective Jay Swan is charged with investigating the murder. An outsider in his own Indigenous Australian community who is also ostracised by his white colleagues, Jay has much to overcome in his search for the truth.

Returning from a holiday in Australia straight into lockdown London earlier this year, I soon found myself craving a reminder of those pre-confinement landscapes. Mystery Road is a film to watch if you want to forget your troubles and lose yourself in a methodically plotted procedural, or if you want to see the wide open spaces of a distant land that feels further away than ever before – or simply if you want to see a good man in pursuit of justice in a corrupt world. If any of those things seem appealing right now, then this could be the film for you. His brilliant sequel, Goldstone (2016), can also be found on BFI Player.

Simon Duffy
Programme and Research Manager

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