Written and directed by David Michôd, the writer and directory behind 2011's mesmerising and universally acclaimed Animal Kingdom, The Rover is a ferocious slow-burning thriller, in the tradition of an iconic Western, with a classic anti-hero at its centre. Set in a near future of social and economic decay, services, utilities, law and order have fallen into dangerous disrepair. And yet people from all corners of the world have come to this place to work the mines that feed the Asian century, and with them have come the leeches, refuse, hustlers and criminals who hope to exploit the mines' margins.
In the middle of this world is Eric (a riveting performance by Guy Pearce), alone and empty - once a farmer, now a drifter, little more than a shell of anger and ennui. He has nothing left but his car and the road. We meet him mid-journey, possibly his last. When a gang of petty criminals led by Henry (the brilliant Scoot McNairy) flee the scene of a scam gone horribly wrong, they crash their truck outside the Cambodian diner and manage to crawl out of the wreck and steal Eric's car. And thus a story begins: one of a man who will do whatever he must to get his car back, and one that you will never forget.
What could have been a routine story turns into an exceptional one when Eric manages to get the gang's wrecked vehicle back on the road and is soon confronted by the badly wounded Rey, with a totally unrecognisable Robert Pattinson delivering the performance of a lifetime.
Eric and Rey are forced into an unlikely partnership. Eric wants his car back and the young and naïvely helpless Rey is the only person who knows where it might have gone. Together they travel the desert roads, encountering the refuse and survivors of the new/old Australian landscape - murderous carnival workers and circus performers, Asian refugees and Aboriginal kids, traumatised shopkeepers and the remaining fragments of a besieged and disillusioned military trying to hold the world together.
The idea for the film was first conceived in 2007, when friend and actor Joel Edgerton and Michôd were in Los Angeles, contemplating their next steps. "We worked for about 10 days nutting out the bare skeleton of a story. Then I went away and started writing the script, and got emotionally involved in it and started feeling like I really wanted to direct it," recalls Michôd.
"The Rover is set in an unspecified near- future, but is, in essence, a film about today. It's about the rapacious capacity for under-regulated Western economies to destroy themselves and it's about the inevitable shifting balance of global power. It's about the seemingly intractable problems of human greed and environmental destruction and the despair these forces might elicit in struggling people. More than anything, it's about the ways these factors affect the emotional lives of individuals," Michôd added.
Unlike many films set in a dystopian future, Michôd did not want the devastation of The Rover "to be seen as the consequence of a single unforeseen cataclysmic or apocalyptic event. Imagined cataclysms frequently allow viewers or readers an opportunity to distance themselves from the earth and air of the story. I want The Rover to feel like an entirely conceivable world of the very near future, a world despoiled by very real forces and systems at work all around us today".
"This isn't a complete collapse of society - it's an inversion of present-day global power dynamics. This is Australia as a resource-rich Third World country. This is the violence and unrest of contemporary Sierra Leone, the DRC, Nigeria and Guinea. And at the centre of this world are two men: one, a murderously embittered Australian man, a former soldier who has lost his farm and his family; the other, a simple-and-naive American boy, too young to remember a time when things were anything other than what they are."
When we first meet Eric at the start of the film, he has basically reached the end of the line. As the world around him has disintegrated, Eric too has disintegrated. Pearce explains: "We find him at an extreme low point, he has nothing left in his life. The lack of justice in this world has eaten away at him."
Eric is, from the beginning, on an individual journey of sorts. His car is his one last possession and it carries a deep personal significance for him, so when it is stolen by a trio of petty criminals, he sets out on a ruthless mission to get it back - whatever the consequences. Eric has lost all hope and does not care about anything or anyone in this world. His hunt for his car is as much about his need for some kind - any kind - of momentum as it is about his attachment to the car itself. At the point the two meet, Rey's journey is about survival.
Pearce explains: "We certainly see initially how vulnerable Rey is in the world, particularly as he's injured and he's been left behind by his brother. Eric really has no interest, he has not one iota of compassion for this kid. He purely is using him to get back what he needs." So the two men are forced to stick together out of necessity.
Pattinson describes Rey as "a dependant who has been protected by people his entire life, but he has also burdened them, and he thinks that he can't really live as an independent person. He's a little slow and very, very needy, and he feels like he needs people to look after him all the time."
Throughout the film, there are several developments that progress Eric and Rey's emotional journey. Pearce says: "Eric finds some sparks of life and love, ultimately through Rey, that don't necessarily wake him up and change him or give him any sense of hope or positivity, but they kind of confuse him because he's lived for so long now in a very depressed state. We see the power shift a little bit, and we actually see that Eric starts to feel something for this kid, and that is not good for Eric. He hasn't felt anything for anybody for 10 years or so, so it becomes a really complex scenario for him."
Ultimately, The Rover is about two vibrant but broken characters trapped in extraordinary circumstances, with two great performers bringing Eric and Rey to glorious life and will definitely break your heart.
The Rover is a film that might slip under the radar of commercial cinema, but one that should not be missed under any circumstances. It's not only that unique, it's that good.
Read more about The Rover and other new films opening this week at www.writingstudio.co.za
