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.
The facts of the crime Hurley has come to reopen are all open secrets that everyone knows and few care about. The cops came and went, life continued on. It’s this resignation—especially in Collins and Wanganeen’s gripping performances—that matches Baker’s muttered lines of questioning. He can believe that everyone knows what happened but him. Rubbing his buzzcut as we stare at his tattoos, Baker exists in a constant state of slow-burning frustration. The drive to Do Good still powers him, and it’s stymied at every turn. An impotent detective is a noir staple, but Baker’s character accepts this impotence, giving him a vagabond freedom to pivot—to uncover what, if any, good he can still do.
In the midst of these genre pillars and the enjoyable details that decorate them, the script swings a wrecking ball around, its preoccupation with Christianity and all the obvious imagery that comes along with it smashing into us over and again. It ostensibly connects to Hurley’s addiction problems, and to the larger idea of being stuck in Limbo, but compared with how understated and gritty the rest of the noir feels, this big weighty religious obsession is like a “Hell Is Real” billboard in no man’s land.
As Australia, and the world at large, grapples with its long history of ignoring Indigenous women (or worse), the different approaches to this generational, wide-reaching trauma will test how effective they are at capturing the different facets of grief, hopelessness and cruelty covered up by an indifference all but mandated by law. The Moogai, out of Sundance this year, attempted to fit this pain into a blunt boogeyman. Limbo, more wisely, strands the hurt in the Outback, where it persists, year after year, as just another part of life. Ivan Sen’s hard-boiled detective story has no other way to be, sunbaked and brutally honest.
Director: Ivan Sen
Writer: Ivan Sen
Starring: Simon Baker, Rob Collins, Natasha Wanganeen, Nicholas Hope
Release Date: March 22, 2024
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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