Berlin Syndrome (MA). Director: Cate Shortland. Starring: Teresa Palmer, Max Riemelt. 116 minutes
Hounds of Love (MA). Director: Ben Young. Starring: Emma Booth, Ashleigh Cummings, Stephen Curry, Susie Porter. 104 minutes
Australian filmmakers have long displayed a knack for the thoroughly unpleasant, delivered with a dose of social awareness. Just as in the 1970s low-budget, ultra-violent films like The Road Warrior and Dead End Drive-In considered the plight of characters living on the margins of collapsed post-apocalyptic civilisations, in the 2000s, Animal Kingdom and Snowtown examined the alienation and vulnerability to corruption of socially disenfranchised characters living among us in the suburbs.
If two current Australian films are anything to go by, then one social issue weighing on local filmmakers in 2017 is the danger to women of emotionally and physically violent men. Neither film is a mere portrait of victimhood. The heroes of Cate Shortland's recent Berlin Syndrome and Ben Young's upcoming Hounds of Love — in the former, an Australian traveller in Europe, in the latter, a teenage school girl in suburban Perth — are ordinary women with both the will and capacity to fight back against their assailants.
Shortland's film is the third in a loose trilogy of films that complexly examine the characters of women under duress. Somersault (2004) was a coming of age story about a teenage runaway looking for love via sex. Lore (2012) concerned the cross-land flight from Germany of the daughter of a Nazi officer, immediately following Hitler's suicide. The danger to Berlin Syndrome's Clare (Palmer) is more specific: she has a one night stand with handsome German Andi (Riemelt), and wakes to find herself his captor.
Clare's realisation of her predicament is gradual, but the horror of it is absolute. She is tied to a bed and raped. Even when her restraints are loosed she finds herself in a heavily fortified appartment deep inside an otherwise unpopulated building. It was she who initiated that first sexual encounter, employing some concerted persuasion to do so. The troubling subtext that her abduction is a kind of punishment for such sexual transgression is rebuked by the extent to which she proves to be both vulnerable and powerful.
Not content to present a straightforward prey-predator dichotomy, Shortland's psychologically disturbing (and, yes, unpleasant) thriller quietly explores Andi's character without quite sympathising with him. Meanwhile so robust is Clare's humanity that she is able to offer Andi comfort following a personal tragedy, even