In the Winter Dark is Australian Gothic, the kind of dark, gloomy, slow-moving, stories, weighed down with symbolism and writhing with guilt-ridden characters.

If you want to see night-time scenes of the Aussie bush, then this is a pretty film to see, but what is the point of this story? The message is that people do ugly things for ugly reasons, like weakness of character. I didn't get any new insights from this film.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, "Drama is life with the dull bits left out." This film feels like the opposite of drama. People and animals are slaughtered in the name of Australian cinema and birth and death are portrayed as equally gruesome. But death and ordinary life are not really drama, no matter how grueling, they're just everyday stuff.

by Ali Kayn

See also: Bucky's review
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