RED HILL, a film written and directed by first-time feature-film maker Patrick Hughes, is a cinematic masterpiece. This is one Australian film not to miss when Sony release it in December.
The story starts unfurling from the opening moment - a panorama shot of the Victorian alpine country shrouded by white fog. It is a sheer joy to watch because everything on screen is shot for maximum impact.
If you thought Animal Kingdom was good - you ain't seen nothing! For me, Animal Kingdom was a small television story shot for television but shown on the big screen.
Red Hill is cinema - a big story shot for the big screen.
This is ... will be ... an icon of the Australian cinematic drama, alongside Peter Weir's Gallipoli, Phil Noyce's Newsfront. Perhaps Red Hill producer Greg McLean, who wrote, directed and produced Wolf Creek in 2005, helped Hughes realise the full potential of this film and achieve a level of excellence no one ever expects any more from Australian film. It's a thriller and it's an intense, gory ride - it's like Die Hard on steroids without the cute humour.
Introducing the Brisbane preview, Sony's Australian MD Stephen Basil-Jones, mentioned that it has been called Australia's No Country For Old Men. It may be on par for excellence but it's not as bloody.
Red Hill truly is the vision of an amazing auteur - Hughes edited the film also. His fluency in cinematic grammar lifts a good script to a great film because of the expressiveness of every shot and the extraordinary design - the use of props and locations. This must have been one hell of a shoot with so many different camera angles. There's no sign of laziness or lack of imagination.
Every shot is part of an intricate design to reveal the story, the character of a town, it's police and the city cop who's just transfered into the supposedly sleepy little community.
It's perfectly cast and the actors give the performances of their lives. The film positively bristles because of the stunning character portrayals by all of them including Steve Bisley, as Red Hill's top cop Old Bill, and Tommy Lewis, as the ultimate human terminator - the town's former top black tracker.
Hughes works for a multi-award-winning company called Radical Media which produces everything from musical videos, such as Justin Bieber's Somebody To Love, to the amazing new media experiment called, The Johnny Cash Project. They've put up a video of Johnny Cash online and engineered it so anyone can take any frame of the video and turn it into a piece of art in whatever style they like. These frames are inserted into the video to create a new video from the original one which is a collaborative work of online art. You can see every frame and the name of the artists on a timeline. It is worth a look.