Mystery Road

Teetotal detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pederson) returns to his hometown in the Australian Outback to investigate the murder of a young girl. Forced to endure both an ineffective – and possibly corrupt – small town police squad and his alcoholic ex-wife, Jay is desperate to uncover whether his estranged teenage daughter is involved in drugs and prostitution.

A modern day Outback noir, Mystery Road sets off down the Coen Brothers’ tracks, but quickly veers back into familiar territory. With stunning vistas and a few idiosyncratic characters appearing early on only to disappear, writer/director Ivan Sen is clearly aiming to make an interesting genre film but ends up with something plain generic.

In the Outback the man with the straightest shot is king, but the issue with Jay is that he's a little too straight. All of the tropes of Chandler or Hammet are clearly mapped out but Detective Jay Swan is no Marlowe; he just isn't engaging, or all that interesting.  [David McGinty]