Like a pickaxe chipping off sandstone, Limbo is a flinty Outback noir that revels in smashing its hard-edged characters against one another. A return to form for writer/director Ivan Sen—an Indigenous Australian filmmaker whose 2013 movie Mystery Road, its sequel and its miniseries spin-off all deal with similar subject matter—this cold-case thriller hacks through its genre clichés and Christian symbolism early so we can appreciate its charming, somber core.
Simon Baker leads the way as grizzled fuck-up detective Travis Hurley, tasked with revisiting the 20-year-old murder investigation of a small-town Aboriginal woman. Her adrift siblings, played with measured stand-offishness by Rob Collins and Natasha Wanganeen, have been shaped by the decades-long ripples of that half-hearted, racist effort. Any hope of justice seems nil. Any hope of helping this traumatized family…well, maybe there’s a glimmer—like an opal covered in this South Australian mining town’s dust. Hurley, aloof from the start and blitzed on smack as soon as he gets a spare moment alone, figures out what’s truly needed as he susses out the local lore and takes in the living situation out here in the desert.
Limbo’s black-and-white photography and stark frames (shot by Sen, who did the music, editing and VFX as well) emphasize the locale’s dried-mud buildings and well-worn ruts. Even when you’re moving through it, you’re stuck. The blinding sun washes out the frame, especially during aerial shots of the sparse, dry landscape. Most noirs work in blacks; Limbo operates in shades of searing white. That makes the subterranean shadows that Hurley roams all the more enticing—caves and tunnels have become so entangled with this mining community that hotels, churches and squatters all seem to reside beneath the dirt, alongside the buried gems. They hide in the alluring void, shaded from the heat and the light. You want to wander there, averting your eyes from the painful truth.
While it’s hard not to wrinkle your nose at Limbo’s more overt metaphors, Sen builds a sense of place so well that its thematic connection to the plot feels natural and inescapable; the shadows and sunbeams—the jewels and crags—they spell out how easy it is to forget about morality out here, any hope eroded away and buried under a layer of dust. It’s the perfect setting for a sweaty, not-so-satisfying mystery that was never much of a mystery in the first place. What happened to this woman? We all know. But can anything really change how this community feels, or will it all settle back down into its amnesic equilibrium, like sand blown over footprints? Combined with a few standout conversations in Sen’s script, one filled with little moments of endearing realism, Limbo‘s aesthetic escorts us to a perfectly purgatorial realm.