Crushed

Synopsis:  Ellia (Sarah Bishop) returns home to her estranged family after her father’s accidental death at the family’s Mudgee vineyard. But when the local police decide that he was murdered, her mother (Roxane Wilson) becomes the prime suspect. As Ellia starts to dig around for a motive that might explain her father’s death, her suspicions fall on her Uncle David (Les Hill) or perhaps her former boyfriend, Lucas (Robert Preston) but the more she discovers about the truth behind some of the strange happenings in the local area the more she finds herself haunted by an event from her past.

This low-budget film has plenty of the right hallmarks for a good murder mystery – an unusual location in a small, insular community; an accidental death that turns out to be murder; plenty of suspects; old tensions that rise to surface when the estranged daughter returns home; a mystery that people are going to great lengths to cover up; and a deep dark secret from the past. It’s all there just waiting to be told.  So it’s a shame that these ingredients don’t come together in a more satisfying and gripping way.

The problem here seems to be that so much of the film is devoted to plot and exposition that it misses out on the opportunity to really flesh out its tight little cast of characters beyond the role or the function they play. Nor does it capitalise on its terrific location. Rather than drawing us into a visceral actuality of the world of wine-making, these elements serve more as a backdrop to the story which is largely told in scenes set in more non-descript locations like moving cars or verandas and bedrooms or the police interview room. At one point, Ellia receives a veiled threat that relates to the danger of one part of the wine-making process, but we don’t actually get to see what that danger is so it doesn’t really provide us with enough tension or thrill to bring us to the edge of our seats.

Bishop does a good job with Ellia. She carries the lion’s share of the film’s narrative but even her character feels undeveloped. There are numerous scenes of her drinking alone often too early in the day leaving us in little doubt that she’s a woman with a drinking problem. But the cause of that is never really explored, nor does it end up as an impediment to overcome when her poking around puts her life in danger. Hill and Preston are both suitably suspicious in their roles and Millie Spencer-Brown is believable as Harriet, the sister who’s borne the brunt of family responsibility since Ellia left, but there’s little scope for any of them to give us much more than face value. The stand out performance for me was Jamie Irvine as Ivan, the hired help. It’s only a small role but every time he comes on screen he manages to find something fresh and engaging that gives us just the right amount of ambiguity between being a dopey country lad and someone who might just be a bit more sinister. It’s the kind of light and shade that many of the other characters lack.

When the mystery at the heart of the murder is finally revealed, it’s a good one and quite topical but Riakos (who also wrote the screenplay) relies too much on Ellia making great leaps of deduction rather allowing the audience to uncover the truth along with her. The final scenes play out like a Greek tragedy with a mounting body count, a good amount of hysteria, and a climax that is hampered by simultaneous confessions of both the secret behind the father’s murder and the buried secret from the past.

 

 

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