Portrait Of The Outlaw As A Young Man: 'True History Of The Kelly Gang'

If you've read Peter Carey's marvelous 2001 True History of the Kelly Gang, you'll be aware going into a faithful new film adaptation of the novel that the word "true" is a signal to literary mischief and sly tampering with received history. Director Justin Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant mirror Carey's grimly playful take on the myths that have grown around Ned Kelly, leader of the notorious Australian Kelly Gang.

In his second feature after the chilling 2012 horror movie , Kurzel adds a ravishingly brutal visual grammar that century Wild West with no clear boundaries between those who break the law and the British colonizers meant to enforce it. Not that there's much law to start with. A former theatrical designer, Kurzel wrings a ravaged beauty from a rural landscape so blighted, its trees stick straight up in the air, leafless and barren. The soundtrack, by turns eerie and jangling, draws on the frantically nihilist punk canon of the 1970s, exactly a century after the Kelly Gang's rise and fall. In a recurring, misleadingly romantic long shot we see Ned riding a white horse through the countryside.