![]() In its dredging up of a sordid national tragedy and in its framing, Wright's film echoes Nitram, Justin Kurzel's portrait of Martin Bryant, the man responsible for the Port Arthur massacre, which strategically skirts the use of his name and cuts off at the moment of impending violence. The boy, here named James Liston, and his family members, remain unseen unheard from. Though Teague's crime – Cowan's crime – underwrites The Stranger, it is not actually depicted, nor are the victims. "I don't really listen to music," Edgerton's character tells Henry stiffly, seeking to curtail their interaction. He's seemingly entreating the man he believes to be his new friend and underworld patron – played by Joel Edgerton ( The Green Knight), who also produced the film – to do… something, though it's discomfortingly unclear what. The highly publicised case remained unsolved until 2011, when an elaborate undercover sting operation yielded a confession from Brett Peter Cowan, leading to the recovery of some of Morcombe's bones and items of clothing from a muddy clearing near the Glass House Mountains and, eventually, in 2014, the unrepentant killer's conviction.Īnd yet, as Henry Teague – Cowan's cinematic counterpart – the most explicitly violent thing Harris is shown doing is firing off a bunch of imaginary rounds from an unloaded gun his way of expressing pleasure at having been cut into an arms deal.įar more sinister is Henry's dancing: arms outstretched, palms open and eyes straight ahead, in thrall to the opening bars of Icehouse's Trojan Blue. ![]() Though the people involved have been fictionalised (rather than impersonated) and their names changed, The Stranger takes as its basis one of the most notorious crimes in Australian history, being the 2003 abduction, sexual assault, and murder of 13-year-old Sunshine Coast boy Daniel Morcombe. It's these conflicting impulses – to shrink from to stare at – that characterise the cultural obsession with true crime, made prominent by a recent proliferation of podcasts and documentaries dedicated to the genre (although, as Truman Capote or indeed any 19th-century newsie would attest, it's hardly a new phenomenon). ![]()
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