Dir. Steven Kastrissios, 2008, Australia, 95mins
Cast: Peter Marshall, Caroline Marohasy, Brad McMurray
Review by Richard Dilks
I made the body count in The Horseman to be ten. That's one murder per ten minutes of running time, which may not sound impressive. However, Christian (an emotive, humane and vicious performance by Peter Marshall) seems to spend about ten minutes on each kill, wrestling his victims across the blood-spattered rooms in which he murders them. Guns hardly feature; the tools of any good Aussie bloke's workbench do.
It's a tribute to Marshall's performance that, despite the gore, I still felt him to be the victim by the film's end. It's his daughter's death after filming a porn film, which starts him on his desperate quest for revenge on everyone involved.
I didn't quite buy the film's plotting, which is unimaginative and becomes stale. I wasn't hugely gripped by its low-key, drained look – although it's appropriate. I thought the other performances proficient, but the characters limited. What I did believe was Marshall's performance because of its intensity. It kept me watching through some torrid scenes in which Christian slowly assassinates his enemies without mercy.
Caroline Marohasy plays Alice reasonably well given the script, but made me wish for the much more sophisticated portrayal of coming-of-adulthood by Abbie Cornish as Heidi in Somersault , an Australian film from 2004. The Horseman seems like it would have liked to be The Limey , Steven Soderbergh's gloriously shot and acted revenge thriller from 1999. There too a father retraces a daughter's last steps and becomes a vendetta. But that had nuance, pace, charm and danger.
The Horseman is visceral; pumps you full of fight– but then offers nothing more beside Peter Marshall doing his best – sometimes succeeding – in connecting you to something other than pipe on bone. The adrenalin recedes, with nothing to take its place.
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