Kiss Me Deadly

You can certainly feel the heat, sweat and blood seeping through Burning Kiss (2018), writer/director Robbie Studsor’s sexy, surreal self-pegged ‘summer noir’. For a low-budget independent feature debut shot in Perth, it’s an impressive feat. Essentially a three-hander, the film stars Liam Graham as an enigmatic stranger who enters the lives of – and complicates the relationship between – a thuggish father and his daughter.

I speak to Studsor about playing with the traditions of film noir and creatively fusing a multitude of other art-cinema influences to create an intoxicatingly unconventional Aussie crime cocktail.

Oliver Pfeiffer: How did the story of Burning Kiss come about?

Robbie Studsor: I wanted to do something where someone is trying to create a story – almost like a whodunnit, except you know ‘whodunnit’ [right from] the start, then they kind of invent the story as they go along. That was the first thing I was interested in, and that’s what happens in the film: the father character, Edmond [Richard Mellick], kind of creates a fake story to try and catch Max [Graham], who we already know is the perpetrator – so it’s sort of