As vast as the Australian landscape is, so is the Aussie horror movie, with the directors that call this country their home drawing on the continent’s vast wilderness to lose themselves in grief, as is the case in Joseph Sims-Dennett’s The Banished. When we meet Grace (Meg Eloise-Clarke) she is lost in many ways. First, her estranged father has just died. Second, she has no way of contacting her brother and third, she is now literally lost in the Australian wilderness after losing her hiking guide and ex-teacher Mr. Green (Leighton Cardno).
The Banished locates us in Grace’s hometown, an old mining community now impoverished and dwindling, with rumors of a commune living in the forest beyond. There are many mysteries yet to be revealed, including Grace’s estranged relationship to her family, a hinted traumatic event in her past, and the town’s many missing people, which is often to the films detriment. As the desperate hiker is waylaid by explanations and confrontations, the film doesn’t even begin to cover the complex history between white settler colonies and Aboriginal natives that it hints at. Which given how messily everything else is handled, that could, in fact, be a blessing.
When The Banished relents, briefly, from revealing each of these mysteries it succeeds at becoming an eerie work of horror. A disembodied voice that comes through Grace’s walkie talkie is both a source of solace and fear. As she nears this unidentified man, the revelation of his identity has a chilling effect, as if this addendum to the story was plucked from campfire ghost stories, designed to make the hairs on your neck stand on end.
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In fact Joseph Sims-Dennett would do well to get out of his own way and let the atmosphere of the Australian wilderness do much more of the talking than Grace and her co-conspirators do. There are moments when The Banished lets nature speak for itself, clearly drawing inspiration from Picnic at Hanging Rock, as the boulder formations seem to stare back at her. But between the many different family traumas revealed through bursts of abrupt conversation, the effect is cheapened, becoming filler b-roll like the endless monkey footage in the third season of The White Lotus, instead of an ominous reminder of a sentient landscape.
By the time Grace reaches the cult she assumes holds her brother, we have been taken off this narratorial trail by many alternative paths, including two other missing individuals and the aforementioned stranger over the radio. In taking an hour to reach the cult in question, the third act of The Banished feels like the second act of another film. The confrontation and conclusion are a bloody rush to amp up to the folkloric reveal that has been pitifully blinkering in the distance throughout. All in all, it seems Sims-Denett was just as lost as his protagonist, charging through the bush grasping at the flora and fauna of his narrative concepts hoping to bask in the sinister mystery of the landscape but instead getting weighed down in the weeds. The Banished contains some interesting ideas, but ends up being lost to the wilderness it fails to depict.
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