Director’s approach is to maintain one great big poker face in this perplexing and surprisingly low-key film
Making a
comedy themed around Australia’s
immigration detention system inevitably entails an element of risk, but one can never underestimate the power of well-directed farce or ironic statements. That is what I told myself going into the new
Australian film Below, starring Ryan Corr as a detention centre employee who makes a mint from streaming footage of detainees fighting inside a rectangular outdoor cage – which looks vaguely like something from Mad Max or
Turkey Shoot.
Going in, I had in my mind something along the lines of the asylum seeker comedy Lucky Miles, which put forward political commentary by invoking the absurdity of various situations – many involving flummoxed characters walking cluelessly across an unforgiving Australian landscape.