LIMBO (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Limbo, Brainstorm Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2024

Twenty years before the police detective arrives in the Outback town of Limbo, a teenage girl was murdered there. The killer or killers were never found, and neither was the girl's body. Limbo, then, is about a string of unanswered questions, but more to the point, it's about those who are trapped in the absence of answers, because too many people were too disinterested or uncaring to ask the important questions about the murder of an indigenous person in the first place.

This leads us to perhaps the biggest question about writer/director Ivan Sen's movie: Why is Travis Hurley (Simon Baker), a white cop from some big city in Australia, the central figure of this story? In terms of plotting, the logic is sound, to be sure, because Travis can and will do what none of the other characters in town are able or want to do.

He can move between the family of the murdered girl, still grieving and now shattered because of the ramifications of the killing and the botched investigation, and at least one person of interest in the old case without any issues. This is his job, after all, and if we're to get as full a picture of the murder and the town as possible, this inquisitive outsider is probably the best bet.

On a thematic level, Sen's choice sort of works, too. Travis is no ordinary cop. Indeed, we might want to take a better look at his badge a couple of times as the story unfolds. He dresses casually, drives an unassuming compact car, is covered in tattoos, and only stays in town initially because someone has stolen a vital computer chip from his vehicle. Oh, Travis is also a regular user of heroin, a habit he presumably picked up while on the narcotics beat and that he appears to have no intention of kicking anytime soon.

If anyone is going to solve a two-decades-old murder, it probably isn't this guy, but then again, that's not actually his assignment in coming to Limbo, an old mining town that's mostly open spaces with massive holes and dug-out hills breaking up the sameness of the desert—made even more monotonous by Sen's choice to film in stark black-and-white. However, Travis is not here to solve the murder.

No, he's in Limbo simply to determine if there's any new information that might lead the police to reconsider re-opening the cold case. It's almost as if his department doesn't care or is passively sabotaging the possibility of a new investigation by sending Travis, and considering how poorly the initial investigation was handled, that's not too much of a stretch to believe.

All of this, though, is mainly looking for a justification as to why this story, which is ostensibly about the historic oppression of and the more modern prejudice against and the continuing consequences of those on Aboriginal Australians, features the main character it does. It makes some sense on the surface, but because the decision ends there, Sen's movie winds up being more superficial than the depth of ideas it clearly wants to examine.

Instead, it's a pretty straightforward detective yarn, as Travis meets with the victim's surviving family members, finds people who may have seen or might know something that didn't come up in the first investigation, and keeps coming upon dead ends or intuitive solutions that don't have any evidence to back up the reasonable assumption. Of key importance are the dead girl's two siblings, Charlie (Rob Collins) and Emma (Natasha Wanganeen).

After their sister's murder, the family was separated, because the local police convinced the government that their mother, who died regretting and resenting that she could never bury her daughter, was not a fit parent. Charlie now lives in a camper next to an abandoned mine, and Emma is raising her own daughter and her brother's two kids, because he doesn't consider himself a fit parent. There's so much sad and tragic history here, but like Travis, we are merely observers of it, from the physical, emotional, and temporal distance of a routine investigation into something that happened so long ago. Apart from some connections to Travis' own sad background (divorced and the father to a son whom Travis thinks is better off without him in the boy's life), these characters exist as just part of the backdrop of the detective's story, because it's not actually about them, despite the entire reason for the story's existence revolving around the murder and its aftereffects.

Through the family, Travis gains some leads, learning about how the police botched the investigation—even accusing Charlie—and why those who do know something are so skeptical of talking to some outsider cop—a long history of injustice, including torture and extrajudicial executions, against the indigenous people here. Everything points to one man, who was suspected at the time but was never charged, but he's dead now—buried unceremoniously by his brother Joseph (Nicholas Hope), who acts a little suspiciously in his own right.

As a straightforward mystery, Limbo is notable for how deeply the ambiguity of the case is embedded into the plot and characters. It's a moody tale that possesses too many intrinsic elements that keep us from feeling just how hopeless it actually is.

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