Wolf Creek 2 (2013)

Wolf Creek 2 arrives nine years after its predecessor and asks nothing of the culture beyond a strong stomach. Greg McLean returns to the Australian outback with John Jarratt's Mick Taylor, a xenophobic killer who dispatches German and British backpackers with a Bowie knife and a running commentary. The film is a sequel, a horror picture, and a grim little travelogue. It contains no thesis. The villain's contempt for foreign tourists is a character flaw, not a platform, and the film never invites us to examine it as anything else. The lone woman in the principal cast is bound, threatened, and killed before the halfway mark, and the film mourns her only as a plot inconvenience.

What the film does offer is a ten-question quiz on Australian history and cricket, administered at the point of a grinder, and a singalong of Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport. These are torture devices inside the fiction, not sermons aimed at the audience. The opening scene mocks two highway patrol officers chasing a ticket quota, a gag about petty authority and nothing larger. The outback here is a killing floor, not an ecosystem in peril. There is gore, there is a decapitation, there is a substantial kangaroo body count, and there is no lesson attached to any of it.

For the classifier, this is a clean specimen. A film can be nasty, competently made, and entirely uninterested in the moral vocabulary of the current decade. Wolf Creek 2 is all three. It draws on the real murders of Ivan Milat and Bradley John Murdoch and converts them into straightforward genre fiction, with no revisionist framing and no sermonizing coda. The closing title cards explain a character's institutionalization with the flat efficiency of a police report. Nothing is being argued. Something is being sold, which is fear, and the transaction is completed without a single note of instruction. A zero across the ledger, and a rare, almost restful thing to encounter.