Critics reviews

It's a slow-burner that seethes with anger and Michôd does everything he can to deglamourise the outpourings of splenetic violence. It's rare that the camera captures death in grisly close-up, or accentuates acts of murder with editing or sound design.

What elevates The Rover above these B movies are the wonderful cinematography by talented newcomer Natasha Braier and the assured, measured way Michôd depicts his future world.

Michôd's worldview verges on fashionable pessimism, which is another way of saying that his ostensible character studies play like excuses to indulge in matter-of-fact violence. Unexpected shots to the head punctuate The Rover like a teenager snapping her bubblegum, and they soon become monotonous.

It's true that existential torpor has driven some of the best action films ever made, from Jean-Pierre Melville's languid epics to the lurid hollowness ofApocalypse Now. But here the vacant core seems less like a philosophy than a pose, an excuse to not develop characters, explain motivations or fill in the gaps of a shaggy dog story, one that keeps getting more brutal while maintaining the same hangdog tone.

Pearce was born for this stuff, but Pattinson—grunting slack-jawed to the point of needing subtitles, another layer of obfuscation Michod casts over the film—is sublime. The startling chasm between his characters in The Rover and Cosmopolis suggests a range that'll be properly acknowledged only when Pattinson is older, less appreciated as a heartthrob than for his skill as a seasoned vet.

Similarities aside, The Rover is almost worth it for the coiled central performance of Guy Pearce, who outfuries Mel Gibson with his pinpoint shotgun skills and monomaniacal quest. Weaker people get in his way—and suffer. There's a purity to the utter lack of rationale here; this, combined with Michôd's way with a landscape, makes for a passable guy-picture masquerading as something deep.

Pattinson turns the film emotional, after a slow buildup - there's contrivance in sending him in to put a gun on his brother, but it does serve as a crystallization of the movie's pain. The final movement cemented my admiration: the funeral pyre is sad, aware of what's lost; the burial of the dog is heartbreaking. Despite oddnesses and a built-in mannerism, a beautiful film.

I wasn't crazy about it. But the director is David Michôd, who made Animal Kingdom. He's got a knack for social haywire. You want to keep seeing what he comes up with, because he's smart and has talent. The last shot of this new movie is both an emotional gut punch and a sick joke.

Michod's commitment to unsympathetic storytelling and hardened characters allowed "Animal Kingdom" to maintain palpable dread at every moment. In "The Rover," the empty tension dissipates with time. Like the earlier movie, it culminates in an abrupt exchange of gunfire, but the meager payoff after such a blandly prolonged buildup can't compete. As one of the characters sighs that "not everything has to be about something," but "The Rover" never manages to manages to fully justify that excuse.

It becomes clear early on that the director is more after creating the mood of violent desolation than revealing anything about the characters that would make them richer. This strategy proves to be double-edged, since Michôd's obvious talent for framing, cutting and mise-en-scene whets out appetite for a fully imagined cinematic world, while the basic view of post-Apocalypse we get wears down rather quickly.

Those looking for big action and bombast will inevitably be disappointed, but Michod (who also wrote the script, based on a story he conceived with actor-writer-director Joel Edgerton) strikes an eerie, unsettling tension early on and rarely lets go — a mood immeasurably enhanced by "Animal Kingdom" composer Antony Partos' original score...

The Rover is a haunting story conceived by Michôd and Joel Edgerton (Baz in Animal Kingdom). The story pacing and cinematography is sublimely assured. As Eric and Rey make their way across the deathly plains of some misc Aussie dustbowl towards the film's delightful pay-off, Michôd makes it feel like there is all the time in the world. He has a talent for the self-contained set piece.