The River
2012 · 13m · Australia
Directed by Tarquin Netherway
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
Two unsupervised teenage boys drift along a small suburban river, filling their empty days with compulsive, stupid games, while an older man in their house acts out his own strange rituals.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Netherway's refusal to dignify the boys' games with narrative urgency is genuinely uncouth—most coming-of-age films would turn their stupidity into epiphany, but this one lets the absurdity just sit there, rotting. The older man's parallel rituals create this queasy non-logic that shouldn't work but does, because the film has the guts to never explain itself.
There's a deliberate formal ancestry here—the oblique observation of Bresson, the suburban ennui of a certain strain of European art cinema—that Netherway wears with visible awareness, using silence and spatial composition to build a mood of collective drift rather than plot.
The entire film's uncanny power hinges on a single tonal choice: keeping the camera locked and patient while the boys move through the river, refusing to cut away or amplify their chaos, which makes their compulsive games feel less like adolescent mischief and more like ritualistic hollow—that restraint transforms a modest 13 minutes into something genuinely unsettling on almost no budget.
Reviews
Film de fin d'études dont l'étrangeté appuyée peut autant séduire qu'agacer, il emprunte la voie de l'expérimentation trouvant naturellement sa place cette année dans la section Labo du Festival de Clermont-Ferrand. Son récit, abstrait et elliptique, laisse surtout la place aux sensations, notamment visuelles.