Erskineville Kings Review

Marty Denniss wrote himself the quieter half of this film and handed Hugh Jackman the louder one, and the trade pays off. Wace is all coiled resentment, a man who stayed home to nurse a violent father and now wants the bill paid in full, and Jackman plays him without ever asking to be liked. The picture was shot for almost nothing over a handful of nights in inner Sydney, and that shows in ways both good and bad. Streetlight and pub neon give the interiors a grubby honesty a bigger budget would have sanded off, but the camera has no real ideas, parking itself in front of scenes and waiting them out.

The writing strains hardest when it reaches for lyricism. Several speeches about fathers and duty land like monologues written to be performed rather than things anyone would say at two in the morning outside a terrace house. What survives is the pressure between the two brothers, particularly a long kitchen confrontation where the accusations stop being about the dead man and start being about which of them was allowed to leave. At seventy-eight minutes it knows exactly how little it can carry.